Health systems in the European Union perform a vital social security function. They mitigate both health and financial risks and make a major contribution to social and economic welfare. In light of various cost pressures, the Council of the European Union has articulated the challenge facing...

The first official data releases of quarterly real GDP for the euro area are published about eight weeks after the end of the reference quarters. Meanwhile, ongoing economic developments must be assessed from various, more readily available, monthly indicators. We examine in the context of...

This paper analyses the information content of M1 for euro area real GDP since the beginning of the 1980s and reviews theoretical arguments on why real narrow money should help predict real GDP. We find that, unlike in the U.S., in the euro area, M1 has better and more robust forecasting...

After the switch to a floating exchange rate in 1973, the Swiss National Bank at first adopted annual monetary targets and in the 1990s shifted to a medium-term targeting strategy. In this paper I review the SNBu0092s internal policy analysis, an aspect of Swiss monetary targeting that has...

With the development towards comprehensive and more sophisticated border control regimes, the problem of protection seekers’ access to EU territory has increasingly come into focus. Disorderly movement is presently the main avenue to safety in the EU, and human smugglers act as important...