This chapter presents the results of the comprehensive literature survey and supportive empirical assessment of the potential impacts of the Financial Transactions Tax recently adopted by the European Commission in response to the significant financial sector misallocations arising from the...

The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 crystallized the underlying imbalances that are currently acting to tear apart the Euro area monetary and fiscal systems by focusing markets and public attention on the core cause of the overall Euro crisis, the insolvency of the Euro area member-states...

While a widespread consensus exists among macroeconomists that the German labour market reforms in 2003-2005 have successfully contributed to the decline of the unemployment rate, critics claim that the reforms led to wage restraint and consequently consumption dampening accompanied by...

This paper discusses the literature which associates the economic characteristics of EMU with arguments of the optimum currency area (OCA) theory and asks for missing capstones that would meliorate EMU to eventually resemble an OCA. As potential candidates for such building blocks, some sort of...

While a widespread consensus exists among macroeconomists that the German labour market reforms in 2003-2005 have successfully contributed to the decline of the unemployment rate, critics claim that the reforms led to wage restraint and consequently consumption dampening accompanied by...

This paper introduces a data-driven, transparent and unbiased method to calculate the economic costs of the Brexit vote in June 2016. We let a matching algorithm determine a combination of comparison economies that best resembles the growth path of the UK economy before the Brexit referendum....

The main result of the quick reactions of the Federal Reserve (the Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) to the Covid-19 crisis are that more than 20% of their public debt is now held by these central banks and that the balance sheet of the ECB is now near 50% of GDP (33% for the Fed). Two...

This paper surveys the literature on tax competition, and uses it to analyse current European proposals to harmonise corporate tax rates. It begins, in the course of Section One, by introducing the phenomenon of international tax competition, and illustrates, with the use of secondary research,...

The recent Global Financial Crisis (2008-2010) and the accompanying Great Recession (2008-2011) show that the level and the rate of monetary and financial systems integration deployed within the Euro area is not sustainable in the long run. Instead of acting as a buffer against external shocks...

In 2020, in the context of the COVID-19 health crisis, the rules of the Stability and Growth Pact were temporarily suspended in the European Union. Nevertheless, the European Council and the European Parliament reached an agreement for the reactivation of these rules in 2024. A simple analytical...