Empirically, the macroeconomic institutions and the macroeconomic policy approach in the Eurozone have failed badly, both in terms of preventing the global financial and economic cri-sis from becoming a euro crisis and in generating a rapid recovery from the crisis, in particular. In this paper...

The German debt brake is often regarded as a great success story, and has therefore served as a role model for the Euro area and its fiscal compact. In this paper we fundamentally criticize the debt brake. We show that (1) it suffers from serious shortcomings, and its success is far from certain...

Currently fiscal policies in Germany seem to be in a very comfortable position and the German Debt Brake is regarded as an institutional precondition for this success and has been exported to the Euro area in the guise of the Fiscal Compact. In this paper we scrutinize German fiscal policies and...