In open economies excess demand in the tradables sector often manfests itself in an external deficit instead of the employment gap that is applied in the usual Phillips-curve model. The inflationary pressure in this case arises from an expected or actual weakening of the exchange rate and its...

It is generally recognized that countries wanting to join a monetary union should display the optimal currency area properties. One such property is the similarity of business cycles. We therefore undertook to analyze the synchronization of business cycles between the EMU and eight new EU...

This paper studies inflation persistence with time-varying coefficient autoregressions for twelve central European countries,in comparison with the United States and the euro area. Inflation persistence tends to be higher in times of high inflation. Since the oil price shocks, inflation...

The new EU leadership â?? the president of the European Commission and his team of commissioners, and the presidents of the European Council and of the European Parliament â?? will have to address pressing challenges. Go to eu2do.bruegel.org to read all the Memos, download the individual Memos...

1) Competitiveness adjustment in struggling southern euro-area members requires persistently lower inflation than in major trading partners, but low inflation worsens public debt sustainability. When average euro-area inflation undershoots the two percent target, the conflict between intra-euro...

Highlights 1) Irrespective of the euro crisis, a European banking union makes sense, including for non-euro area countries, because of the extent of European Union financial integration. The Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) is the first element of the banking union. 2) From the point of view...

We study the transmission of monetary policy to macroeconomic variables with structural time-varying coefficient vector autoregressions in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, in comparison with that in the euro area. These three countries have experienced changes in monetary policy regimes...

This article studies inflation persistence with time-varying coefficient autoregressions for 12 central European countries in comparison with the United States and the euro area. We find that inflation persistence tends to be higher in times of high inflation. Since the oil price shocks,...

Data from 135 countries covering five decades suggests that creditless recoveries, in which the stock of real credit does not return to the pre-crisis level for three years after the GDP trough, are not rare and are characterised by remarkable real GDP growth rates: 4.7 percent per year in...

Data from 135 countries covering five decades suggest that creditless recoveries, in which the stock of real credit does not return to the pre-crisis level for three years after the GDP trough, are not rare and are characterised by remarkable real GDP growth rates: 4.7 percent per year in...