Some euro area countries accumulated large and persistent external imbalances during the upswing, revealing important weaknesses in the macroeconomic management of the monetary union. Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain ran large current account deficits by historical standards, while Finland,...

Europe is putting in place a new system of fiscal rules following the euro area sovereign debt crisis and decades of rising government to debt-to-GDP ratios. These include the so-called “six pack” to upgrade the Stability and Growth Pact to a new Treaty incorporating the “fiscal...

This paper considers the increase in current account imbalances in euro area countries since the early 1990s. While the euro area as a whole has remained relatively close to external balance, the current account balances of individual countries have diverged: Spain, Greece and Portugal ran large...

The euro area financial system took excessive risks during the global credit boom, which in some countries led to an unsustainable increase in credit, higher asset prices and housing booms. This process helped to fuel large imbalances within the euro area. Banks played a key role in channelling...

Some euro area countries accumulated large and persistent external imbalances during the upswing, revealing important weaknesses in the macroeconomic management of the monetary union. Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain ran large current account deficits by historical standards, while Finland,...

This paper presents a framework to assess the impact of a wide range of structural policy reforms on GDP per capita at various horizons by linking together previous empirical studies mostly carried out by the OECD. The simple accounting framework consists of reduced-form equations and offers a...

The fiscal framework needs in practice to achieve a balance between, on the one hand, effective budgetary rules that allow governments to commit to sound policies and, on the other, judgements and discretion in how these are applied so that the framework adequately reflects the complexity of the...

Using a panel of UK firms spanning three decades, we provide estimates of the long-run elasticity of substitution between capital and other factors of production, the (negative of the) elasticity of capital and investment with respect to the user cost. The parameter is estimated using 'time...