Twenty years of euro history confirms the euro's stability and position as the second global currency. It also enjoys the support of majority of the euro area population and is seen as a good thing for the European Union. The European Central Bank has been successful in keeping inflation at a...

In this paper we estimate the effect of government consumption shocks on GDP using a panel of 21 developing economies. Our goal is to better understand the reasons for the low fiscal multipliers found in the literature by performing estimations for alternative exchange rate regimes,...

It is widely debated whether a monetary union has to be accompanied by a fiscal transfer scheme to accommodate asymmetric shocks. We build a model of a monetary union with a central bank and two heterogeneous countries that are linked by a fiscal transfer scheme with repercussions on monetary...

Twenty years of euro history confirms the euro's stability and position as the second global currency. It also enjoys the support of majority of the euro area population and is seen as a good thing for the European Union. The European Central Bank has been successful in keeping inflation at a...

Following the Great Recession, eurozone countries have performed worse than even the currency union’s most pessimistic critics had predicted. The paper identifies the strong fundamental flaws in the design of the eurozone and proposes a set of reforms, both in the structure of the eurozone and...

This paper looks at the planned austerity measures in Spain, the rationale for the spending cuts and tax increases, likely outcomes for future debt-to-GDP ratios, and the probable results of alternative policies.

This paper looks at three countries that have been hard-hit by the world economic recession, and have turned to the IMF for assistance: Hungary, Latvia, and Ukraine. In all of these countries, it would appear that there were more sensible responses to the crisis that would reduce the loss of...

The replacement of national currencies by a common currency in the EMU causes a monetary externality if the European Central Bank is inclined to monetize part of outstanding government debt in the community.High government debt in one part of the EU then increases the common inflation rate.We...

This paper puts forward a proposal to help monetary policies confront the challenge of the "normalisation" of money creation and interest rates. The difficult unwinding of years of unorthodox policies put financial stability at risk in major monetary centres and in EMEs. The authors argue that...