EU Member countries have shown different degrees of ambition to reach a budget position of "close to balance or in surplus". Differences in ambition can only partly be explained by the relative size of cyclical safety mar­gins or differences in the number of votes in the ECOFIN Council. It is...

After a brief introduction dealing with critical opinions of some economists on the European austerity policy, the authors point out that austerity as a means of achieving fiscal consolidation and financial stability is applied when the fiscal domain is weak. After analyzing the effects of the...

Using the model derived by Bajo-Rubio (2014), this paper estimates government budget balance-consistent growth rates for the euro area countries. A comparison of these estimates to their actual growth rates indicates that most of these countries are growing at rates that are very similar to...

Pay and European integration / David Marsden and Jean-Jacques Silvestre -- The internal market and relocation strategies / Daniel Vaughan-Whitehead -- European economic integration from the standpoint of Spanish labour market problems / Jos(c)♭ Luis Malo de Molina and Pilar Garc(c)Ưa Perea --...