Digitisation processes have – often through disruptive innovations – injected additional competition in many markets, be it online retailing, new transport platforms, electronic banking and brokerage, online travel agencies or new media formats. At the same time, a number of companies,...

Big Data is expected to unleash data-driven innovation,which is supposed to better address and solve challengesin our society. As a so-called non-rival good, the sharingand re-using of data by one actor does not diminish its valuefor other actors and can create significant spillover effects....

Distinguishing between two different schools of thought that are named after two different universities, Harvard and Berkeley, the article looks at the evolution, past and future, of the international monetary system. While the empirical view holds that the system will remain unipolar and...

The European Commission methodology for computing the cyclically adjusted government budget balance provides a robust measurement of the fiscal position of the Member States. The fiscal semi-elasticities at the core of this method are structural parameters, mostly of fiscal nature, not linked to...

The Italian sovereign bond market experienced considerable disruption in May 2018 and subsequent months amid concerns about the fi scal implications of political developments in Italy. This episode is used to examine relationships among the euro area bond markets some six years after the euro...

As austerity policies are unpopular with voters and high debt levels are a drag on growth, several economists, most famously Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, have suggested that governments might have to consider an extra dose of financial repression as a way out of the low growth-high debt...

The discussion about low interest rates and appropriate debt rules gained renewed impetus after Olivier Blanchard’s 2019 presidential address to the American Economic Association. Interest rates are persistently below growth rates in most advanced economies, including euro area sovereigns....

Protectionist moves may be countered by reference to the conundrum of capital scarcity. In a world in which unilateral imposition of trade barriers are a looming possibility, capital scarcity may nevertheless imply that free trade is a kind of Nash equilibrium.

With interest rates at zero where they are expected to remain for a long time, and with the main risk being that inflation is too low, fiscal policy must be active and contribute to cyclical stabilisation