The onset of the financial crisis in 2008 has highlighted the problems of diverging external imbalances within Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the role of persistent losses in competitiveness. This paper starts by investigating some of the competitiveness factors which contributed to...

This paper assesses how globalisation has shaped the economic environment in which the ECB operates and discusses whether this warrants adjustments to the monetary policy strategy. The paper first looks at how trade and financial integration have evolved since the last strategy review in 2003....

The design of the initial scoreboard is presented in the first Alert Mechanism Report (AMR) issued by the Commission on 14 February 2012. This paper adds to the AMR by describing in more detail the rationale of the different indicators, the choices made in the selection process and how they...

At the moment of the euro cash changeover, inflation perceptions in the euro area deviated from measured inflation, and in some euro-area Member States in a persistent way. In recent years, a growing body of literature has developed on the factors that might explain this deviation. This paper...