Low fertility rates and long-life expectancies are igniting Europe’s fast ageing. This demographic trend poses a serious challenge to the public balances of most EU Member States. Understanding what measures can effectively address this challenge is of high priority for most governments. In this...
This study examines major reform proposals of EU fiscal rules from an economic and legal perspective. We disassemble the reform proposals in their components and analyse them in their specific proposed form in comparison, thereby shedding light on what is legally possible, economically sensible,...
This briefing explores the performance gap between EU-15 and EU-13 countries under Horizon 2020, the reasons for this gap and policy options at national and EU levels....
This paper shows how the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure (MIP) could be streamlined and its underlying conceptual framework clarified. Implementation of the country-specific recommendations is low; their internal consistency is sometimes missing; despite past reforms, the MIP remains largely ...
This paper analyses the effects of the implementation of the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP) on the macroeconomic performance of countries in the EU and the euro area. We find that the introduction of the MIP led to a decline in current account imbalances and private sector debt and cred...
The main aim of the paper is to assess the contribution of the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP) to its original objectives. It analyses whether the European Union and the Euro Area are today better equipped to identify and prevent unsustainable macroeconomic developments in the future. It...
A net budgetary balance is a highly misleading indicator of the benefits from EU spending and EU membership. Budgetary decisions taken on the basis of this indicator result in poor policies as they are biased towards programmes with monetary backflows into Member States. This ‘juste retour’ ment...
In this paper, we present the results of the comprehensive assessment of the accuracy of European Economic Forecasts. High-quality macroeconomic forecasts are a prerequisite for economic surveillance of the European Commission. We evaluate forecasts for three key variables – GDP growth, consumer...