The article reviews the key steps in the construction of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the accompanying debate in the academics and within the European institutions, stressing that most vulnerabilities unveiled by the sovereign debt crisis were known long before the inception of the...

The volume collects the essays presented at the 15th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 4 to 6 April 2013. The workshop focused on the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances and comprised four sessions. The first session concentrated on the...

We estimate a fully-fledged structural system for the housing market in Italy, taking into account the multi-fold link with bank lending to both households and construction firms. The model allows the house supply to vary in the short run and the banking sector to affect the equilibrium in the...

This paper reviews the main macroeconomic trends and the debate on policy priorities in Italy since the end of the Nineties. In the decade up to the outbreak of the global crisis (1998-2007), in Italy the reform process came to a virtual standstill; this is partly due to the fragmentation of the...

Since the mid-2000s standard price-competitiveness indicators for some European countries have been providing conflicting signals, particularly in Italy. Against a broad stability of the producer price (PPI)-based measure, the manufacturing unit labour cost (ULCM)-deflated indicator points to a...

This paper reviews the main macroeconomic trends and the debate on policy priorities in Italy since the advent of EMU. It argues that, in the decade up to the outbreak of the global crisis (1998-2007), in Italy the reform process came to a virtual standstill and fiscal policy was inconsistent...

Italy’s economic growth over its 150 years of unified history did not occur at a steady pace nor was it balanced across sectors. Relying on an entirely new input (labour and capital) database by us built and presented in the Appendix, together with new Banca d’Italia estimates of GDP by...

The Narodowy Bank Polski organized during November 14-15, 2013 an international workshop to discuss current issues in the field of real estate analysis from the central bank's point of view. The development of residential real estate prices as well as commercial real estate prices and real...

This paper traces the main macroeconomic developments in the German economy from national unification. Its performance is compared with that of the rest of the euro area and its largest economies. The study documents as Germany�s modest growth in the later 1990s was due to the restrictive...