This occasional paper reviews the macroeconomic developments in the euro area countries over the past 20 years. It analyses the accumulation of macroeconomic imbalances in the first decade of the EMU and their unwinding during the second decade. It shows that while flow imbalances have been...

The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which the dispersion of real GDP growth rates has changed over the past few years and whether the synchronisation of business cycles has increased among the euro area countries. The study is divided into two main parts. The f irst focuses on...

This study presents some stylised facts on wage growth differentials across the euro area countries in the years before and in the first eight years after the introduction of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999. The study shows that wage growth dispersion, i.e. the degree of difference in...

This occasional paper reviews the macroeconomic developments in the euro area countries over the past 20 years. It analyses the accumulation of macroeconomic imbalances in the first decade of the EMU and their unwinding during the second decade. It shows that while flow imbalances have been...

The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which the dispersion of real GDP growth rates has changed over the past few years and whether the synchronisation of business cycles has increased among the euro area countries. The study is divided into two main parts. The first focuses on...

This study presents some stylised facts on wage growth differentials across the euro area countries in the years before and in the first eight years after the introduction of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999. The study shows that wage growth dispersion, i.e. the degree of difference in...

In light of recent global economic and geopolitical shocks threatening trade openness, this report aims to shed light on geoeconomic fragmentation and develops a rich set of new tools to assess its economic effects and implications for central banks. The report shows that, although global trade...

This paper studies the short-term and long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for productivity in Europe. Aggregate and sectoral evidence is complemented by firm-level data-based findings obtained from a large microdistributed exercise. Productivity trends during the COVID-19 pandemic...

Well-functioning economic structures are key for resilient and prospering euro area economies. The global financial and sovereign debt crises exposed the limited resilience of the euro area's economic structures. Economic growth was masking underlying weaknesses in several euro area countries....

The consensus back in 2008 - ten years after the introduction of the euro - was that the adoption of a common currency had made a limited impact of around 2% in total on the trade flows of the first wave of euro area countries (Baldwin et al., 2008). Since then, six more countries have joined...