Since the onset of the sovereign debt crisis, the crisis-stricken countries in Europe have been pushed to take drastic steps to consolidate their finances and reduce their budget deficits. Despite strong public opposition and largely damaging short-run effects, the countries have undertaken many...

Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain were all hit by the economic downturn in the course of the financial crisis and have been struggling with national debt crises and recession. A problem common to all of these countries is the collapse of national demand. Foreign trade might seem a logical way...

In the new member states of the EU which have not yet adopted the euro, previous adoption strategies have come under scrutiny. The spillovers and contagion from the global financial crisis revealed a new threat to the countries’ real convergence goal, namely considerable vulnerability to the...

Using a novel approach, this paper analyses the deliberately communicated uncertainty of the ECB to the market. Specifi cally, it semantically analyses the uncertainty expressed in offi cial ECB press statements. The analysis shows how the ECB tries to alert or appease the market with different...

The most prominent and debated issues in the negotiations on the next Multiannual Financial Framework for the EU for the period 2014–2020 were the overall budget volume, the structure of expenditures and the continuation of the rebates for (some) net contributor countries. However, the system...

Ignoring for a moment the debate on whether balanced budget rules are a sensible idea from a macroeconomic point of view, there remains a major problem with tying one’s fiscal policy to econometric estimates of potential variables: their notorious unreliability. With every one of its biannual...

The US manufacturing sector is currently experiencing its most signifi cant upswing in 35 years, leading many politicians and economic analysts to claim that the US economy is being re-industrialised. While the notion of a renaissance of the industrial sector does not seem far-fetched, given...

Diverging fiscal policy paths, housing booms and diverging unit labour costs were driving forces of rising intra-European current account imbalances, which were underpinned by low interest rates. Since the outbreak of the crisis, the adjustment of intra-EMU current account imbalances has been...

Youth unemployment has been on the rise since the beginning of the crisis in 2008. Even more troublesome is the dramatic rise in the number of youth not in employment, education or training, which has led to widespread concerns about the impact on social cohesion and fears of a “lost...