Senior Resident Fellows Reinhilde Veugelers and Bruno van Pottelsberghe provide recommendations for the term of new Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes in this supplement to Bruegel's Memos to the New Commission: Europe's Economic Priorities 2010-2015. They argue that Kroes should move past...

Innovation is key to the future of Europe. This Policy Contribution, written together by Mathias Dewatripont, Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management; Bruno van Pottelsberghe and André Sapir, Senior Fellows at Bruegel and professors at ULB; and Reinhilde Veugelers, senior fellow at...

This policy contribution by Bruno van Pottelsberghe and Gaétan De Rassenfosseargue that the number of priority filings should be used as a patent-based measure of EuropeÂ?s innovation performance.  The paper identifies several policies that may affect the R&D-patent relationship.

Credit rating agencies (CRAs) have not consistently met the expectations placed on them by investors and policymakers. It is difficult, however, to improve the quality of ratings through regulatory initiatives. In the short term, changes to the CRAsâ?? regulatory environment, in a context of...

The crisis has underlined the strong interdependence between the euro-area banking and sovereign crises. To understand the role domestic banks have played in holding sovereign debt, a breakdown of government debt by holding sectors is required. The data shows that at the start of the crisis,...

A drastic change in the way we produce and consume energy is necessary to contain the risk of global environmental catastrophe. For its part, the EU has set agreed to a greenhouse gas reduction target of 80-95 percent by 2050, compared to 1990. However, with the current fuel mix, even the most...

European Union policymakers have in principle put innovation at the heart of competitiveness, in particular in the Europe 2020 strategy. But in merger control, assessments of the innovation effects of mergers are inadequate, even though mergers and acquisitions can have a significant impact on...

This Policy Contribution reviews the major challenges faced by the euro area, and discusses recent initiatives and the way forward. Some implications are drawn out for Latviaâ??s euro accession, which is likely to be beneficial on balance. The euro area faces three major challenges: (1) high...

Credit rating agencies have been under the spotlight since the beginning of the current financial crisis. They failed in their assessment of US residential mortgage- based securities in the mid-2000s. Nevertheless, investors generally consider credit ratings useful to help form their views on...

The G20 acted as a crisis manager when global financial markets were under threat in 2008 and 2009, and contributed to a positive outcome. However since then, in the more routine work of crisis prevention, its performance has been less convincing at best, and criticism of its effectiveness has...