This paper looks at the recent debt crisis in Greece and argues that the crisis exemplifies a sequence of systematic mistakes made by International Financial Institutions, mistakes whose consequences had been clearly anticipated at the time of the first bail-out and could have been avoided. I...

This paper argues that fiscal convergence in the Euro area has been achieved at the expenses of real divergence in unemployment, investment and at, at least temporarily, growth. Statistical and econometric analysis support the view that the current fiscal framework has addressed debt...

This paper discusses whether a country should conduct fiscal policy by targeting a structural (or cyclically adjusted) fiscal balance. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section discusses the concept of cyclically adjusted balance (CAB) and points out practical and conceptual...