This paper assesses whether or to what extent the macroeconomic imbalances, which emerged in the "North" and "South" of the European Monetary Union before the financial and economic crisis of 2008/09, are symmetric. Firstly, we calculate bilateral exports and imports between all EU member...

This paper assesses whether or to what extent the macroeconomic imbalances, which emerged in the "North" and "South" of the European Monetary Union before the financial and economic crisis of 2008/09, are symmetric. First, we show that the imbalances stemmed from different growth patterns and...

We revisit the debate on the role of technological improvement and market share reallocation in determining aggregate productivity gains. Contrary to previous work that neglects dependencies between suppliers in global value chains, we explicitly account for input linkages that impact both...