In October 2004, the Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs (ECFIN) held its first annual research conference. Its theme was "Business Cycles and Growth in Europe". The thirteen papers presented are collected here in revised form in two volumes as Economic Paper number 227, 1/2...

While current instruments of EU economic policy coordination helped stave off a fullscale depression, the post-2007 global financial and economic crisis has revealed a number of weaknesses in the Stability and Growth Pact, the EU framework for fiscal surveillance and fiscal policy coordination....

This study presents the main features of the Swedish approach for resolving the banking crisis of 1991-93 by condensing them into seven policy lessons. These concern the importance of political unity behind the resolution policy, a government blanket guarantee of the financial obligations of the...

The standard way today to obtain measures of inflationary expectations is to use questionnaires to ask a representative group of respondents about their beliefs of the future rate of inflation during the coming 12 months. This type of data on inflationary expectations as well as on inflationary...

This paper studies business cycle synchronization in the three Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway and Sweden prior to, during and after the Scandinavian Currency Union 1873-1913. We find that the degree of synchronization tended to increase during the currency union, thus supporting earlier...

This paper explores the anatomy of the boom, deep depression and recovery in the Finnish and Swedish economies in the period 1985-2000. These fifteen years are divided into three phases: (1) financial liberalization and the boom and the overheating of 1985-90, (2) the outbreak and spread of the...

The 4th DG ECFIN Annual Research Conference was held on 11-12 October 2007 in Brussels, with over 100 participants. The theme was 'Growth and income distribution in an integrated Europe: does EMU make a difference?'. The choice of topic for the conference was inspired by growing concern about...

The introduction of the euro as a currency in physical existence in January 2002 was a major step in the European integration process. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a representative selection of 12 000 Europeans across all countries in the euro area view the effects of the euro...

The Swedish referendum on the euro in September 2003 is an exceptional event for researchers of monetary unions and of European economic integration. Voters chose between maintaining the domestic currency, the krona, and replacing it with the euro, the single currency of the European Union. The...

The length of collective wage agreements in Sweden between 1908 and 2005 is explored to evaluate a variety of policy regimes from the wage contract-makers' perspective. Adopting a new long-run test, it is found that wage contract length decreases in response to an increase in "macroeconomic...