It is widely agreed that the natural unemployment rate recovered strongly in several OECD economies in the 1990s while not yet in the others. This paper draws on models by the authors endogenizing the path of the natural rate in order to trace the causes and apportion the credit. The results...

Alors que les économies de l'Europe continentale ne laissent pas de décevoir depuis deux décennies, il paraît nécessaire — et il s'avère fécond — de convoquer une « hypothèse institutionnelle » pour éclairer cet échec. Celle-ci s'articule autour de l'idée que c'est dans le...

On the 30th of August, Governing Council of the ECB decided to lower the key interest rates by 25 basis points. May be this decision was the only available in view of the evolution of core inflation in Europe, but for reasons made clear below, it is not going to ease the fiscal debate in Europe....

L'appréciation de l’euro depuis le début de la présente décennie, après sa baisse en 1999 et 2000, et l’incertitude sur son évolution future, obscurcissent aujourd’hui l’horizon de la croissance européenne. Mais si l’on observe l’évolution passée de l’euro, reconstituée...

In 2003 Chancellor Schroeder launched an ambitious structural reform package (Agenda 2010), that simultaneously reformed the pension system and the labour market (following the proposition of the Hartz commission report, of August 2002). This program reinforced a trend already visible since the...

Parce qu’un projet économique est toujours fondé sur une doctrine d’essence politique, le hiatus entre intégration économique et projet politique n’existe que pour autant que le second demeure implicite. L’Europe économique est donc politique au premier chef et c’est pour cette...

Assessing the ECB’s performance is unusually difficult because both the Bank and the context within which it operates - the integration of 12 national foreign exchange markets - are so radically new. There is no historical precedent. Nor are there any criteria against which to judge monetary...

The large (and increasing) output gap that characterizes the euro area suggests that aggregate demand can physically be boosted. Only fiscal policy could fulfil this task though, being monetary policy at the limit, and structural reforms linked to long term growth. The usual arguments against...

The euro area, after a poor growth performance in 2002, has stepped aside in 2003 the word economic recovery. Concurrently, as was easily predictable since its inception, all the flaws of the SGP emerged once the European economy started to loose speed. Compared to the strongly proactive fiscal...