This paper calculates structural balances for EU-countries and relates them to fiscal sustainability. Although the Stability Pact implicitly accepts the need to distinguish between the structural and the cyclical component of net deficits, the issue of long-term sustainability is only covered by...

Costs of a monetary union are typically analysed in the context of the optimum currency area approach, looking at the likelihood of asymmetric real disturbances, the degree of real wage flexibility and of labour mobility. But it is also important to consider the leeway of monetary and fiscal...

This paper puts forward a Bayesian version of the global vector autoregressive model (B-GVAR) that accommodates international linkages across countries in a system of vec- tor autoregressions. We compare the predictive performance of B-GVAR models for the one- and four-quarter ahead forecast...