Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA) relies on macroeconomic and fiscal policy assumptions; it plays an essential role in providing an anchor for bilateral negotiations and surveillance in the context of reformed EU fiscal rules. While the European Commission assumes a constant short-run fiscal...

While the euro officially came into being in 1999, it was the introduction of euro notes and coins 20 years ago in January 2002 that made the common currency a tangible reality for European citizens. The circle of member states has since grown from 11 to 19, and a growing section of the...

In the July/August issue of Intereconomics, Silke Tober criticised a proposal put forth by Andrew Watt to solve the euro crisis through the use of monetary fi nancing of the public sector. Tober argued that there are valid reasons to keep monetary and fi scal policy separate from one another and...

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.

This article takes a step back from the debate on the precise causes of the crisis and the detailed steps needed to resolve it. It focuses on distributional issues and discusses the ways in which widening income inequality in most European countries has been linked to factors that lie behind the...

This article provides an overview of the impact of public sector pay and employment cutbacks in EU countries and discusses their justifi cation as part of austerity packages. It begins with the outcomes in the countries first hit by the economic crisis before discussing the impact of the crisis...

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.

Following the COVID-19 outbreak in Europe this spring and subsequent measures to contain the pandemic, the European Commission drastically revised its economic and fiscal forecasts. The Summer 2020 Economic Forecast projects that the euro area economy will contract by 8.7% in 2020. The...