This research note discusses the Euro crisis in Greece in light of the referendum of July the 5th. It lays out the social and political costs of a GREXIT, but also of a continuing austerity policy. It proposes a reform policy fostering growth in Greece and discusses the role of conditionality....

We investigate the sustainability of fiscal policy in a set of 19 European Monetary Union (EMU) countries over the period 1970-2016. Panel unit root tests in the presence of cross-section dependence show that the government debt series is stationary, indicating that the solvency condition would...

Chapter 1. introduction -- Chapter 2. The German Hyperinflation of 1923 -- Chapter 3. Macroeconomic Developments from the End of theof the 1960s to the early 1980s -- Chapter 4. The Inflation Wave from the Late 1960s onward -- Chapter 5. Comparison of developments in the various countries --...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes pace of economic growth for Brazil. Moderating activity and stubbornly elevated inflation since 2010 have led to a reevaluation of Brazil’s long-term potential growth rate. Growth accounting suggests that potential growth is probably lower than was...

This paper uses cross country regression analysis on a large set of countries to consider two hypotheses. The first is that increased public debt as a percentage of the economy reduces confidence in financial institutions. The second is that increased public debt relative to the economy lowers...

Rising public debt everywhere has raised the question of how to reduce debt again in the future. High public debt also seems to be an impediment for the exit of central banks from ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing. Historical precedents and proposals have included austerity,...

The coronavirus pandemic triggered strong political action across Europe. Mandatory restrictions to increase social distancing were imposed, commonly known as lockdowns. In some cases, entire countries were virtually locked down for several weeks at a time, contributing to a very severe downturn...

The euro area suffers from excessive public debt, which is the primary cause of the so-called fragmentation. It should be remedied by fiscal consolidation instead of the quasi-fiscal activities of the European Central Bank, which are inconsistent with its legal status, compromise its...

With this paper, our objective is to empirically study public debt sustainability by estimating a fiscal reaction function where the primary balance relative to GDP is assumed to be a function of the public debt to GDP ratio of the previous year and of other macroeconomic variables. In...

We present an analytically tractable two-country New Open Economy Macroeconomics model of a currency union featuring an overlapping gen- erations structure of the Blanchard (1985)-Yaari (1965) type. It enables us to study the transmission and spillover effects of a wider range of fiscal shocks...