Blog Post
The 2019 European elections promise to be a watershed moment for the EU. A recent Bruegel paper made the case for restructuring the Union’s model of governance and integration. The authors of this post critically assess this proposed institutional engineering, and argue for the principle of “an ever closer union” to be safeguarded by a bottom-up approach to respond to the common needs of the citizens.
Blog Post
“It is absurd that Europe pays for 80% of its energy import bill – worth €300 billion a year – in US dollars when only roughly 2% of our energy imports come from the United States,” said President Juncker in his state of the union speech.* Europe’s largest supplier of energy – Russia, who accounts for a third of that bill – couldn’t agree more. Russia’s offer to switch to euros in trade with the EU will likely be costly to implement, but the US switch towards unilateralism is forcing its long-standing partners to question the dollar’s global dominance.
Opinion
As China shifts into a more advanced industrialised economy, Japan has slowly but surely lost to some of its comparative advantages to its rival. One possible solution to help the government keep pace would be to concentrate research and development efforts on a few key sectors where Japanese players still hold a large competitive lead.
Policy Contribution
How can Italian banks address the issue of non-perfoming loans? What lessons can they learn from Japan?
