Opinion
It can be tempting to treat European budgetary discussions as a fairly inconsequential distributional game. But with the EU's role increasingly focused on the provision of public goods, in accordance with its values and priorities, this would be a mistake.
Opinion
The last decade has seen the eastern Mediterranean region become a hotspot of the global natural gas industry, attracting increasing attention from multiple stakeholders also as a result of its high geopolitical stakes. Notwithstanding this momentum, progress has been bumpy.
Blog Post
The ECB is looking to evaluate whether its definition of price stability is effective in helping anchor inflation expectations. We argue that the current definition does not make for a very good focal point. To become a focal point the ECB needs to do two things. Price stability should be defined as inflation at 2 percent,. Remove therefore the unnecessary ambiguity of "below but close to 2 percent". But that is not enough. Around that 2 percent, the ECB should say which levels of inflation it is prepared to tolerate. There need to be explicit bands defined around that 2 percent to provide a framework for economic agents to evaluate Central Bank performance. And as the ECB will have to operate under high levels fo uncertainty these bands need to be wider than tolerance of inflation between 1 and 3 percent, which is what many inflation targeting Central Banks have tolerated over the years.
Opinion
The response of the global financial markets to the trade agreement reached between the United States and China has been very positive, probably excessively so given the relatively limited size of the agreement reached.
Blog Post
Housing prices have been rising fast in the West of the Netherlands in the last five years. However, mortgages outstanding have remained flat, raising the question of what has driven the increase. Evidence suggests that housing supply constraints have, this time around, played a role in pushing the house prices up.
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RT @gregclaeys: New @Bruegel_org paper, written with @alienorcameron, @CatarinaMidoes, @Tagliapietra_S: "How good is the European Commissio…
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"The significance of Zohr and other offshore fields goes well beyond Egypt’s boundaries, as geographical proximity… https://t.co/LlYYjJI0Ad
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"Natural resources remain at the core of the relationship between Russia and the EU. Given European efforts to go g… https://t.co/KDK1TxCjTL
Opinion
The EU needs to invest in homegrown technology.
Blog Post
The EU cannot meet its ‘poverty’ targets, because the main indicator used to measure poverty actually measures income inequality. The use of the wrong indicator could lead to a failure to monitor those who are really poor in Europe, and a risk they could be forgotten.
Opinion
Much has been written on the Wuhan coronavirus that causes the respiratory disease Covid-19, but very little is known yet about its impact on the global economy and, in particular, the global value chain. Still, one thing is clear: The shock is bigger than that caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), for the simple reason that China is much more important for the global economy than it was then.
Blog Post
Current housing markets relative to those pre-crisis seem to be far less driven by mortgage credit, and the size of the construction sector has not increased. This is possibly good news for financial stability because an eventual house price correction would transmit less into mortgage defaults and corrections in economic activity.
Opinion
Germany needs an industrial revival of the sort it experienced in the late nineteenth century, but this will be possible only if the state offers technological backing to German companies. The US government’s successful Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency should serve as a model.
Blog Post
The bigger you are, the more data you can harvest. But does data accumulation necessarily breed monopolies in AI and related machine learning markets?
Opinion
The coronavirus outbreak will not lead to recession but the costs of ensuring growth targets will be high
