Eight months ago, as the risk of sovereign default in Greece first emerged, the Intereconomics Forum invited a number of contributors to examine the options available to EU policymakers. As the threats to European Monetary Union resurface now, six of the same authors return in this issue's Forum...

While past discussions on EMU tended to emphasise its role in limiting the impact of the global financial crisis on the euro area countries, the focus has now shifted to the destabilising effects threatening the entire euro zone as a consequence of the dire fiscal situation in some weaker member...

Fiscal surveillance was developed as a supranational regulatory process to counteract short-termism and deficit biases in government decision-making. With effective monetary policy to stabilize the economy, restraint on the fiscal discretion of national governments was seen as the key to...

Tax and benefit systems generate aggregate intertemporal effects in addition to their interpersonal redistributive effects. These intertemporal effects appear in the cyclical fluctuations in the government’s fiscal position yielded by the ‘automatic stabilisers’. Using EUROMOD, it is...

In a recent decision, the European Court of Justice has ruled that insurers cannot discriminate on grounds of sex in setting premiums or determining benefits. This paper discusses the background to this decision. It asks whether we are seeing a US-style 'rights revolution', fuelled by judicial...

Promoting employment at low earnings figures prominently in several debates on how to make the German social welfare system more prone to job creation. In the U.S., about 15% of all civilian jobs are subsidized via the Earned Income Tax Credit, a transfer program that refunds income taxes beyond...

Die meisten mittel- und osteuropäischen Beitrittsländer bekundeten ursprünglich, sie wollten sobald wie möglich nach dem EU-Beitritt auch der monetären Union beitreten. Der Eifer hat inzwischen nachgelassen. In diesem Beitrag wird argumentiert, dass es gute Gründe für diese gemischten...