The author comments on the months of protest by the "yellow jackets" movement, to provide a diagnosis of the reasons of economic malaise in France. It is claimed that France only really started loosing ground relative to Germany since adhering to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). A reform...

Since the Eurozone’s Effilochement has become a fact and European integration theories, as defined in existing theories, falls short of offering a hope for the salvation of EU’s monetary integrity, the logic of geo-economy is prevailing among the European states. In particular, it means that...

Czechs and Slovaks lived in a common country from 1918 to 1992, and in May 2004 the Czech Republic and Slovakia joined the EU together; nevertheless, these two countries took different paths towards the Eurozone. On January 1, 2009 Slovakia became the 16th member state of the Eurozone, while the...

In this paper we assess the implications for housing supply across the Euro Area of the recent tightening in monetary policy. Official monetary policy rates have risen in response to the sustained period of inflation experienced across countries due to the aftermath of the Covid epidemic and the...

What role does unconventional monetary policy - and particularly unconventional policies like private asset purchases under a quantitative easing or lender of last resort scheme - play in influencing economic growth directly? Emerging and developing countries' central banks could contribute to...

In this paper, we analyze coordination of macroeconomic stabilization policies within the EMU by focusing, in a dynamic set-up, on asymmetries, externalities, and the existence of a multi-country context. We study how coalitions among fiscal and monetary authorities are formed and what are their...

The economic crisis has laid open deficiencies in the construction of the European Economic and Monetary Union. At its foundation, it was assumed that monetary integration would reduce the likelihood of asymmetric shocks. The crisis shows, however, that endogenous mechanisms may even amplify...

In this paper, we examine the performance and robustness of optimised interest-rate rules in four models of the euro area which differ considerably in terms of size, degree of aggregation, relevance of forward-looking behavioural elements and adherence to micro-foundations. Our findings are...

In this paper, we examine the cost of insurance against model uncertainty for the Euro area considering four alternative reference models, all of which are used for policy-analysis at the ECB. We find that maximal insurance across this model range in terms of a Minimax policy comes at moderate...

The monetary integration of the acceding countries will proceed in several distinct steps, starting with membership in the European Union (EU), followed by participation in the so-called Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) II and ultimately entry into the euro area. This paper addresses the question...