The two recent macroeconomic shocks that hit the world economy - the surge of oil and food prices and the subprime crisis – have revived the attention of policy makers and economists on the consequences of shocks, symmetric and asymmetric, and on the appropriateness of the EMU institutional...

There is a mounting discontent in Europe about the conduct of macroeconomic policy in the euro area and especially its policy mix, in the broad sense of the term – the combination of monetary policy, fiscal policy and structural reforms. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the weak...

The European "sovereignty paradox" may be summarized as follows: National States and/or the European Parliament, that are the instances in which resides the democratic legitimacy to implement policies and to react to events affecting the economy, are not endowed with the instruments to act or...

The issue of whether globalization has yielded structural changes in the process of inflation is crucial for the definition of the role of monetary policy, and for an assessment of the strategies followed by central banks around the world. This briefing paper will first frame the argument by...

The ECB has a very clear idea of what European governments should do in the name of ‘sound’ economic management: balance the budget, reduce the role of the state in the economy by cutting public expenditures; increase the flexibility of labour markets by shrinking the welfare state (see for...

Le rapport qui nous est présenté ici, constitue une véritable somme sur la politique française d'aide publique au développement (...). La partie historique et ses conclusions en termes de fondements de l'aide publique au développement est particulièrement intéressante : elle éclaire de...

The European Union (EU) should aim at providing European citizens with European public goods. In a pseudo-federal system like the EU, political deliberation should be about how to finance and produce the public goods that benefit all European citizens, and not only member states individually....

Last year’s International Collaboration Project had helped to highlight several key determinants of potential growth in the European Union (EU): basing upon growth accounting techniques, the main difference between the EU and the US had been shown not to rest on total factor productivity...

The paper endorses the thesis that current macro imbalances are partly due to an excess of household savings in China, whose origin is to be found among other things in household uncertainty about the provision of public services like health care, pensions and education. Focusing on health...

It is widely agreed that the natural unemployment rate recovered strongly in several OECD economies in the 1990s while not yet in the others. This paper draws on models by the authors endogenizing the path of the natural rate in order to trace the causes and apportion the credit. The results...