Sooner or later, the ECB must accept that monetary financing in support of deficit spending is a necessity not just for mitigating the coronavirus crisis, but also for averting a downward deflationary cycle that could pull the eurozone apart.

On 2 April 2020, the European Commission (2020) duly put forward a proposal for the creation of a European instrument for temporary Support to mitigate Unemployment Risks in an Emergency (SURE). This bold and innovative move must be welcome, but the actual profile of this new instrument requires...

Although the common perception is that the pandemic is "the great equaliser", workers’ tasks, contractual framework and position in the internal organisational hierarchy strongly affect their ability to work remotely.

Although austerity was particularly strong in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2008 and its consequences in the euro area, Italian fiscal policies have been characterised by tough consolidation periods ever since the 1990s.

With public debt-to-GDP levels now set to surpass post-war records and Italy’s ratio approaching levels reached in Greece on the eve of the country’s debt restructuring in early 2012, fears of a return of the sovereign debt crisis have emerged.

The long-term fiscal and economic damage of eurobonds in a rule-based fiscal architecture - as history corroborates - would be greater than the historical challenge of the coronavirus pandemic, unless there is a political union in Europe.

While the COVID-19 pandemic posits a significant challenge to all societies around the world, it also reveals in the most dramatic manner the many abysmal differences between so-called advanced economies and the developing world.

Policymakers, experts and the general public heavily rely on the data that are being reported in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. Daily data releases on confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths provide information on the course of the pandemic.

This paper discusses how the technical foundations of the EU’s fiscal rules constrain the fiscal space in EU countries in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We review the evidence on how estimates of potential output, which are at the heart of essential control indicators in EU fiscal...