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 reviews the first five years of experience with the working of the EMU framework for fiscal policy in EMU. It is argued that the balance with the fiscal framework of EMU so far is mixed. The EMU framework has contributed to avoid large fiscal imbalances in EU Member States and has...

This paper assesses the relevance of the competitiveness argument in the debate on the current situation of the Spanish economy. We estimate error-correction models for exports and imports. Econometric analyses suggest that external demand and domestic activity are the more important...

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...

This essay follows the synergies and complementarities between European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the optimum currency area (OCA) theory. Various advancements in economic theory and econometrics have made it possible to progress from the “early OCA theory†to a...

This study addresses and evaluates the impacts of the introduction of the euro on both actual and potential output and employment. In order to achieve this, a descriptive and analytical examination of developments before and after the launch of the euro is undertaken, with comparisons drawn...

Study on sovereign bond market integration and the role of the euro, trading platforms and globalisation. We disentangle different driving factors of sovereign bond market integration by studying yield co-movements of EMU countries, the UK, the US and 16 German Lander in the last 15 years. At a...

Both common macroeconomic shocks and country-specific developments have subjected the flexibility of wage setting mechanisms in the euro area to a stress test in recent years. Against this background, this paper takes a fresh look at wage flexibility in EMU and attempts to draw a few lessons...

In EMU, a country may have difficulty ensuring stability in the face of asymmetric shocks; the response may be unstable, or, even if not, the real exchange rate might overshoot. Fiscal policy may help to stabilise inflation and also to target the real exchange rate. The paper argues that an...

This paper assesses the extent to which the macroeconomic policy architecture of EMU represents a break with the past. This is carried out by estimating forward-looking fiscal and monetary policy rules for the Member States and by analysing them within the conceptual framework of the Fiscal...