Article originally published in Banca Nazionale del Lavoro Quarterly Review, vol. 42 n. 172, March 1990, pp. 3-20. Text of the speech of the 1989 Einaudi lecture.

The paper examines the possible motivations behind the plea for fiscal rules in the Delors Report. We argue that coordination problems arising from aggregate demand spillovers cannot be solved by means of budget rules and that in any case they are not important in Europe. We then discuss the...

This paper is a first attempt at evaluating the determinants of the total interest rate differentials on government bonds between high yielders, namely Italy, Spain, Sweden and Germany. In particular we address the question of the relative importance of local and global factors in the...

This paper analyses the constraints on the choice of the conversion rates resulting from the fact that the external value of the Ecu cannot be changed at the start of the third stage of EMU and that one Ecu must be converted into one Euro. These constraints force the authorities to accept the...

The current account has always been a neglected variable in the management of the Euro area and in the assessment of its members' performance; so has, as a consequence, the savings-investment balance. This paper first reviews the arguments that explain this attitude and justify, under some...

The paper first addresses the question of the sustainability of debt growth by examining the behavior of taxation implied by fiscal rules that respect a government's intertemporal budget constraint. Sustainable debt growth may require the tax burden to rise above some socially acceptable level....