Blog Post
What’s at stake: Spain is currently the EU country with the second highest level of unemployment, after Greece. The high and persistent level of unemployment and the appropriate labour market reforms are a major topic of discussion in Spain. We review arguments made in the blogosphere and by international organisations on the reasons for Spain’s stubbornly high unemployment, and various assessments of the labour market reforms of 2012.
Blog Post
Economic policy coordination in the EU hardly works: the implementation of economic policy recommendations made in the context of the European Semester was modest in 2011, and has deteriorated in each year since then.
Blog Post
Markets are beginning to price in the possibility that the EU will look different on the 24th of June.
Blog Post
The Eurosystem’s regular open market operations consist of one-week liquidity-providing operations (MROs), and three-month liquidity-providing operations (LTROs). We have updated data on the use of these operations by country.
Opinion
The Juncker Plan was launched one year ago to boost investment in Europe: has the plan been successful so far? How can we better use the EIB to increase investment?
Blog Post
With the Juncker Plan, the European Commission intends to support valuable risky projects by expanding the risk capacity of the EIB. But has the new European Fund for Strategic Investments really been used to finance 'additional' projects?
Blog Post
What’s at stake: The Panama Papers leaked last week raised important questions about the role of tax havens. We explain the mechanics of tax evasion and review the most important lessons to take away from the leaks.
Policy Contribution
The current European fiscal framework is inefficient. It should be replaced with a system based on rules more suited to the two core objectives: public debt sustainability and fiscal stabilisation. The rules should be more transparent and easier to implement. These reforms would promote greater compliance.
Blog Post
What’s at stake: Central banks have recently been scaling up their unconventional monetary policy measures. Discussions about helicopter money seem to be getting ever louder. We review the theoretical discussions, the effectiveness of tax-rebates and legal and political complications
Policy Contribution
The ECB has made a series of changes to its QE programme in order to expand the universe of purchasable assets and have more flexibility in the execution of the programme. However this might not be enough to sustain QE throughout 2017. The extension of the programme also raises questions about its potential adverse consequences.
Blog Post
The fundamental problem of economic policy coordination in the EU is that national policymakers are accountable to their national parliaments and focus on national interests, which in many cases differ widely in different member states. It is therefore not all that surprising that economic policy coordination in the EU hardly works.
Policy Contribution
This paper assesses economic policy coordination in the euro area under the European Semester. Despite the collective decision to create this new system of policy coordination, this paper shows that the European Semester has been rather ineffective.