After presenting the institutional construction during the pre-accession and post-accession to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the exchange rate mechanisms (ERM) in several countries and the convergence criteria, we go on with a brief analysis of the way the CEE countries cope with the...

The paper looks at the determinants of fiscal adjustments as reflected in the primary surplus of countries. Our conjecture is that governments will usually find it more attractive to pursue fiscal adjustments in a situation of relatively high growth, but based on a simple stylized model of...

In this paper we estimate a small model of the euro area to be used as a laboratory for evaluating the performance of alternative monetary policy strategies. We start with the relationship between output and inflation and investigate the fit of the nominal wage contracting model due to Taylor...

Against the difficult background of analysing aggregated data in this paper core inflation in the euro area is estimated by means of the structural vector autoregressive approach. We demonstrate that the HICP sometimes seems to be a misleading indicator for monetary policy in the euro area. We...

The paper uses fiscal reaction functions for a panel of euro-area countries to investigate whether euro membership has reduced the responsiveness of countries to shocks in the level of inherited debt compared to the period prior to succession to the euro. While we find some evidence for such a...

Europe is struggling with the resolution of the severe debt crisis and is in the process of overhauling its institutional set up. One element of the reform agenda is the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) which is intended to provide liquidity assistance to countries in case financial stability...