This paper analyses the euro as external anchor in the Western Balkans and their process of fiscal consolidation in the context of future EU accession.

Improving the quality of public finances (QPF) has become a new focus for European policy makers. This focus is largely a response to preparing the European economies for the dual challenge of ageing populations and increased exposure to global competition. At the EU level, the Stability and...

This paper combines both qualitative and quantitative economic analysis which shows that further multilateral trade liberalization through a WTO trade round could yield significant benefits for the global economy. The qualitative analysis restates the economic case for further multilateral trade...

The European Union uses large-scale fiscal transfers to national and regional levels to foster economic and social cohesion. This paper gives an ex-ante model-based analysis of the potential macro-economic impact of these fiscal transfers between member states as planned under the Cohesion...

What can be learnt from revisiting the Optimal Currency Areas (OCA) theory 50 years from its birth, in light of recent advances in open economy macro and monetary theory? This paper presents a stylized micro-founded model of the costs of adopting a common currency, relative to an ideal benchmark...

The last few years have seen both a significant shift in EU state aid policy towards a more sophisticated economic approach and a great enrichment of the economic literature on state aid. This paper examines the control of state aid in the EU in the light of the new literature. It begins with a...

This paper revisits the issue of business cycle synchronisation in the euro area looking back on more than eight years of EMU experience. The dispersion of output gaps across Member States has reached historically low levels since around 2002. Yet, this observation seems to reflect a general...

This paper analyses the effect of labour taxes on Euro area unemployment. Empirical estimates obtained so far can be criticised as being spurious because the regressions generally lack non-measurable variables constituting the reservation wage that can possibly be non stationary. Here we...

The present study focuses on international trade. The aim is to construct a small econometric model allowing the evaluation of the impact of variability on European trade.The report is organised as follows. Section I offers a conceptual analysis of the impact of exchange rate variability on...

A variety of statistical methods and econometric techniques can be used attempting to disentangle the non-cyclical trend component of a time series and its purely cyclical part. This paper serves the purpose to demonstrate the potential contribution from the use of unobserved components...