We use survey based inflationary expectations to explore the forecasting horizons implicitly used by the respondents to questions about the expected rate of inflation during the coming 12 months. We examine the forecast errors, the mean error and the RMSEs, to study if the forecast horizon is...

While current instruments of EU economic policy coordination helped stave off a full-scale depression, the post-2007 global financial and economic crisis has revealed a number of weaknesses in the Stability and Growth Pact, the EU framework for fiscal surveillance and fiscal policy coordination....

This report estimates possible macroeconomic effects of a pandemic taking place in the EU in 2006, using a quarterly macroeconomic model. The macroeconomic costs of a pandemic, that is the cost in terms of production lost due to illness and death measured as reductions in GDP growth and/or...

The failure of key EU Member States to respect the requirements of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) a few years after its inception triggered a heated debate on how to reform the framework of fiscal policy coordination in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). This paper systematically...

This paper compares the boom-bust cycle in Finland and Sweden 1984-1995 with the average boom-bust pattern in industrialized countries as calculated from an international sample for the period 1970-2002. Two clear conclusions emerge. First, the Finnish-Swedish experience is much more volatile...

With the establishment of the EMU and the ECB, the interaction between monetary and fiscal polices is now a major policy issue in the Euro-area, dealt with in detail in the Maastricht and Amsterdam treaties and in the Stability and Growth Pact. This paper provides a background to this issue by...

In October 2004, the Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs (ECFIN) held its first annual research conference. Its theme was “Business Cycles and Growth in Europeâ€. The thirteen papers presented are collected here in revised form in two volumes as Economic Paper number...

This paper studies business cycle synchronization in the three Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway and Sweden prior to, during and after the Scandinavian Currency Union 1873-1913. We find that the degree of synchronization tended to increase during the currency union, thus supporting earlier...

This study of approximately 170 publications shows (a) that US academic economists concentrated on the question "Is the EMU a good or bad thing?", usually adopting the paradigm of optimum currency areas as their main analytical vehicle, (b) that they displayed considerable scepticism towards the...

The introduction of the euro as a currency in physical existence in January 2002 was a major step in the European integration process. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a representative selection of 12 000 Europeans across all countries in the euro area view the effects of the euro...