Working Paper
What drives national implementation of EU policy recommendations?
The authors use a newly-compiled dataset to investigate whether and why European Union countries implement the economic policy recommendations they receive from the EU.
Upcoming Event
At this event Gita Gopinath, Chief Economist at the IMF will discuss the role of national structural reforms in enhancing resilience in the Euro Area
Working Paper
The authors use a newly-compiled dataset to investigate whether and why European Union countries implement the economic policy recommendations they receive from the EU.
Past Event
Who tends to get the blame for the Euro crisis in national media? What do national politicians think about the EU and EMU?
Past Event
When are structural reform efforts successful in fostering productivity and growth when and why do they fail?
Opinion
On March 4th, Italians sent a resounding message in favour of a break with the past. The ultimate test for the new ‘government of change’ will be whether it succeeds where all others have failed over the past two decades: bringing the country back to growth. The authors propose three different actions to revamp Italy’s ailing productivity and gear the country’s productive capacity towards the 21st century: human capital, e-government, and green growth.
Blog Post
The economic agenda of Italian populists is likely to exacerbate rather than alleviate Italy’s longstanding problems. But the piecemeal, small-step approach followed by European and national ruling elites, while perhaps tolerable for countries under normal economic conditions, is insufficient for an Italy stuck in a low-growth-high-debt equilibrium. If defenders of the European project want to regain popularity, they will need to present a clear functioning alternative to setting the house on fire.
Blog Post
Improvement in institutional quality, particularly concerning the rule of law, is the most essential and urgent structural reform the EU can make. Without it, the obtrusive lack of trust in the EU – which has thus far hampered expansionary and reformist efforts – will persist.
Working Paper
Since the financial crisis, EU countries' economies have recovered to the point that they are exiting their adjustment programmes. Institutional stability mechanisms have been improved at the European level, with the promotion of the banking union and the establishment of a European Monetary Fund, for instance. However, the authors argue that such crisis contingencies should include markets in their risk-sharing, which would require better coordination with institutions.
Blog Post
With growth gathering momentum in the eurozone, some have claimed this is the proof that structural reforms implemented during the crisis are working, re-opening the long-standing debate on the extent to which reforms contribute to fostering long-term growth. This column employs a novel empirical approach – a modified version of the Synthetic Control Method – to estimate the impact of large reform waves implemented in the past 40 years worldwide.
Opinion
Better-than-expected growth performance reflects the underlying positive changes in the Greek economy – but net investment is in fact negative, while Greece has various institutional weaknesses. Further improvements must be made regarding Greece’s attractiveness to foreign direct investment. A new (at least precautionary) financial assistance programme would improve trust in continued reforms and also address eventual public debt financing difficulties.
Opinion
The recent amendments of the Chinese Constitution have stimulated much attention, focusing on the power consolidation of President Xi. Though the four key amendments do not mention direct economic reforms, indirect impact should be considered even if clear-cut conclusions are difficult to draw.
External Publication
Central Asia consists of five culturally and ethnically diverse countries that have followed different paths to political and economic transformation in the past 25 years. The main policy challenge for the five Central Asian economies is to move away from commodity-based growth strategies to market-oriented diversification and adoption of a broad spectrum of economic, institutional and political reforms
