This document was commissioned by the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON). It is a quick critique, conducted over a four week period, of those sections of the European Commission’s Impact Assessment (hereafter “the IA”) on the revisions to the Capital...

The financial crisis that began in 2007 as a liquidity crisis for banks has transformed itself into a sovereign debt crisis that threatens the viability of the eurozone and the foundations of the European Union. In this study, we analyse some of the recent regulatory initiatives in response to...

Four years after the introduction of the euro, this paper provides an overview of the current structure and integration of the euro area financial systems and related policy initiatives. We first compare the euro area financial structure with that of the United States and Japan. Using new and...

This paper discusses a wide range of indicators of the degree of integration of the euro area banking system. It is concerned with volume data, a less developed field of research compared with studies on prices/rates. We first set out a methodological framework, a mixture of elementary and more...

In this briefing paper we evaluate the performance of the EIB in its external lending and policies in relation to developing economies including its response to the financial crisis. We recommend policy changes including greater absolute levels of lending to developing economies and greater risk...