experience of the initial years of EMU lends support to this criticism. Overall, unlike the experience in the run-up to EMU …

retrenchment efforts in European Union countries in the run-up to economic and monetary union (EMU). The experience of the … remains to be seen whether the stability and growth pact - which aims to lock EMU members into a permanent fiscal discipline …

government only pursues cyclical stabilisation these biases disappear and there are positive gains from coordinating the policy …

It is largely recognised that fiscal policy will have larger responsibilities for cyclical stabilisation in EMU given … the loss of the monetary instrument. At the same time, the EMU's budgetary framework emphasises the need to rely on … stabilisation. As to the future, a challenge for policy-makers is how to design tax and welfare reforms which, while improving …