As the current financial crisis has shown, macroeconomic imbalances such as persistent current account and trade deficits, can seriously undermine a country’s resilience to economic shocks. Maintaining and enhancing external competitiveness has thus become of increasing concern, particularly...

On May 1, 2004, ten countries in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe will become full members of the EU. The parliaments and monetary authorities of the ten accession countries have already to a large extent adapted their legal and institutional structures to the new Europe-wide environment....

As a consequence of the 2008-2009 international financial crisis the European Union is undergoing per-haps its most difficult period since the beginnings of the European integration. The response to this challenge includes decisions and planned steps to strengthen fiscal discipline in the member...

The European debt crisis triggered a debate on the lacking components of the EU and EMU integration architecture. Many believe that a common currency requires closer fiscal and political integration as a condition for its survival. This opinion is not necessarily supported by the experience of...

The order and modalities of cross-member state redistribution as well as the net financial position of the member states are one of the most widely discussed aspects of European integration. The paper addresses selected issues in the current debate on the EU budget for the period 2007 to 2013...

The 'juste retour' attitude, namely each EU member state's priority for securing the best possible individual net financial position vis-à-vis the community budget over any other consideration concerning the community budget is stronger than ever. The differences across member states in terms...

This study analyses the key patterns of cohesion policy within the overall framework of the EU budget, viewed from the perspective of the new Member States of Central and Eastern Europe. In more specific terms, the main objectives are, first, to analyse past trends of cohesion policy and the...

In December 2019 the incoming European Commission announced the European Green Deal (EGD), which aims to turn the EU into a climate-neutral, circular economy. Although it is as yet not very specific in many areas, the EU's Green Deal sends the right signal and contains several promising...

The Next Generation EU (NGEU) programme is radically changing the way the European Union interacts with financial markets because of its ambitious and ground breaking new public debt programme. The European Commission has adopted a new, diversified borrowing strategy, similar to that of other...

In the light of the lessons learned from the euro area sovereign debt crisis, the EU fiscal and macroeconomic governance framework was overhauled in 2011. Against this background, this paper analyses whether the broadened surveillance of fiscal and macroeconomic indicators under the strengthened...