This paper provides an introduction to the special issue on international lending of last resort. Starting from debates about rescue operations and unconventional policies of major central banks in the contexts of the Global Financial Crisis and the European Debt Crisis, it draws attention to...

The literature on business cycle synchronization in Europe frequently presumes an alleged ‘core‒periphery' pattern without providing empirical verification of the underlying cyclical (dis)similarities or the supposed but unobservable ‘European business cycle(s)'. To provide a data-based...

We propose a novel metric to evaluate price developments within the euro area (EA), which involves the decomposition of the overall variability of cross country inflation rates into common and idiosyncratic labor cost and markup components. The analysis yields several interesting results. First,...

This conference volume investigates the consequences of EU enlargement on structural economic policies in East and West, and in particular on the EU's economic policy coordination processes. Given the aspirations of the Lisbon agenda, most countries in either region face adjustment needs in the...

After completion of the internal market and the introduction of the euro, the European Union put Eastern enlargement on the agenda for the new millennium. When the enlargement process was started in 1997, it was aiming at the stability and prosperity for the entire European continent. The...

Membership in the European Union requires national economic policies to be oriented towards the Community goals of economic growth, stability and cohesion. When entering the EU in 1995, Austria's economy was characterized by a high productivity level and a successful hard currency policy, i.e....

Ever since its foundation, the European Union (EU) has struggled to develop a collective “European identity”, while being exposed to the challenges of globalization, financial disturbances, migration, Brexit, and the coronavirus. However, the hitherto unimaginable Russian inroad on...

Using the case of handicap sports (like horse racing and golf) as an apt analogy, the Eurozone's leverage of competitiveness is first simply demonstrated. It is then argued that there is a discordance between economic theory, and particularly the theory of international trade, and the concept of...

The aim of this paper is to investigate business cycle synchronization between seven candidate countries to the Euro Area (EA) - Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Sweden - and the Euro Area (EA-12/EA-19), France and Germany. The Hodrick-Prescott filter is used to...

This paper measures the convergence or divergence of EMU inflation rates and industrial production by testing for the existence of fractional cointegration relations. The notion of fractional cointegration allows for long-term equilibria with a higher degree of persistence than allowed for in...