Last Friday the European Commission released the spring update on their economic forecasts for European Union member states and some other advanced economies. Negative growth forecasts for the EU and the euro area reflect weakness in the periphery as well as in the core countries. The 2013 growth forecasts for the big European economies were all revised down. Major changes were made to the economic forecasts for Cyprus. Read more
Bruegel blog
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New EC spring forecasts: high uncertainty dominates outlook for Cyprus
7th May 2013
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The new competition rules for technology transfer agreements
6th May 2013
On 18 April, Bruegel hosted a Competition Policy Lab. Competition Policy Labs offer an independent ‘hands-on’ platform for practitioners and academics to meet and discuss hot topics on the competition policy agenda. This time we had Anna Vernet and Luc Peeperkorn for the Commission, and Jacques Crémer from the Toulouse School of Economics. Read more
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Has the U.S. outperformed the euro area due to inflation since 2007?
30th April 2013
The nominal GDP growth differential between the U.S. and the euro area is striking: taking the latest forecasts of the European Commission into account, the U.S. outpaced the euro area by 9 percentage points in 2008-2013. Read more
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A black market in Cyprus? Lessons from Venezuela
30th April 2013
Wherever the government builds fences the market will place stairs to climb them. On March 28th, the Cypriot government imposed capital controls as a measure to avoid bank runs and financial instability in the small euro zone country, but so far there is very little evidence on the existence of a well-functioning black market in Cyprus. Read more
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Which way for the ECB?
30th April 2013
Ahead of the ECB meeting, the debate on the right course for euro area macroeconomic policies has re-emerged. An interesting new feature of the debate is about differentiating monetary policy to better cater for different conditions in different countries of the euro area. So should there be more differentiation of monetary policy across countries and how much can monetary policy achieve? Read more
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Who got their money out of Cyprus?
26th April 2013
The Central Bank of Cyprus released data today on the amount of deposits in Cypriot banks at the end of March. The original rescue plan, involving haircuts to uninsured deposits, was announced on the 16th of March and the final modified agreement on the 25th of March. The data is therefore an early indicator of: (i) the degree of rush by depositors to withdraw their money; (ii) the efficiency of Cypriot capital controls. Read more
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Blogs review: Bold ideas for the eurozone from economic history
26th April 2013
What’s at stake: Bruegel has recently come under criticisms for not proposing bold enough ideas to reform the eurozone. In this review, I present an eclectic set of proposals and analyses that have been put forward by economic historians to reform the functioning the eurozone in a big way. Read more
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La voie étroite de l’intelligence budgétaire
23rd April 2013
Le débat sur l’austérité budgétaire a repris en Europe. Ce n’est pas étonnant. Read more
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What is the net of good and bad news from Brussels and Washington?
22nd April 2013
The short answer is: somewhat positive. The longer, but still broad-brush, answer starts from noting that two important documents have been issued in the last few days: the In-depth reviews following the so called AMR (Alert Mechanism Report) from the European Commission and the World Economic Outlook from the IMF. Read more
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Blogs review: The Reinhart and Rogoff debacle
19th April 2013
What’s at stake: The authors of the widely acclaimed book on the history of financial crises, This Time is Different, have faced the mother of all academic backlashes after a group of economists identified important flaws (including basic coding errors) in their analysis of the relationship between public debt and economic growth. Read more