This paper provides an overview of the key steps that were made in the European Union toward enhancing fiscal policy coordination and integration prior to the Covid-19 crisis. It especially highlights the key challenges and strategies that should be considered when thinking of further fiscal...

With the current sovereign debt crisis, the incompleteness of economic integration in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has become patent leading to an intense debate among academics and policy makers. Most of the debate focuses on the needs to strengthen fiscal rules and to restore fiscal...

The COVID-19 lockdowns have brought about the need of large fiscal responses in all European countries. However, countries across Europe are differently equipped to respond to the shock due to differences in economic conditions and fiscal space. We build on the model by Berger and others (2019)...

This short paper reconsiders the popular result that the lower the probability of getting reelected, the stronger the incumbent politicians incentive to follow short-sighted, inefficient policies. The set-up is a general equilibrium model of endogenous growth and optimal fiscal policy, in which...

The paper develops a unified general equilibrium model includingsavings with overlapping generations, investment and search unemploament. Long-run analytical results for the small open economy identify capital accumulation as a prime transmission channel. The effects of integration on...

This paper studies the connection between trade and growth in the context of a partial and inconsistent liberalization process in a specific Eastern European country in transition towards market economy, namely, the Republic of Belarus. The analysis of the country trade patterns during the USSR...

This paper examines the welfare implications of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) from the perspective of small countries in the context of a multi-country, general equilibrium model. We calibrate our model to represent one relatively small country and two symmetric big countries. We consider...

This paper shows a standard RBC model, when augmented with a VAT evasion channel, where evasion depends on the consumption tax rate, can produce a hump-shaped consumption Laffer curve. Furthermore, when the evasion channel is turned off, the hump in the Laffer curve disappears, resulting in a...