Blog Post
In the past five years ECB forecasts have proven to be systematically incorrect: core inflation remained broadly stable at 1% despite the stubbornly predicted increase, while the unemployment rate fell faster than predicted. Such forecast errors, which are also inconsistent with each other, raise serious doubts about the reliability of the ECB’s current forecast of accelerating core inflation and necessitates a reflection on the inflation aim of the ECB.
Opinion
As the presidency shifts from Argentina to Japan at Buenos Aires (and then to Saudi Arabia) it is worth asking why the G20 has endured this long and what it needs to remain relevant in a dramatically changed world.
Blog Post
Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini is "convinced" that Italians can help out their government, in the face of a widening yield spread between German and Italian government bonds. The authors assess the feasibility of recourse to household wealth in Italy, and estimate the relative importance of foreign debt-holders in the upcoming bond redemptions.
Opinion
In this column, Jean Pisani-Ferry portrays the current international economic and geopolitical order as increasingly reminiscent of chess. Three key players: the US, China and a loose coalition of the other G7 members play three games simultaneously, and no one knows which game will take precedence.
Opinion
After being under the close scrutiny of three financial assistance programmes since May 2010, Greece has finally left the bail-out in August 2018. How different is the post-bail-out era from the preceding eight years? Will Greece be able to stand on its own? And how might the country improve its economic outlook? In this post, which summarises a presentation recently given at an Athens conference, the author answers these three questions.
Blog Post
“It is absurd that Europe pays for 80% of its energy import bill – worth €300 billion a year – in US dollars when only roughly 2% of our energy imports come from the United States,” said President Juncker in his state of the union speech.* Europe’s largest supplier of energy – Russia, who accounts for a third of that bill – couldn’t agree more. Russia’s offer to switch to euros in trade with the EU will likely be costly to implement, but the US switch towards unilateralism is forcing its long-standing partners to question the dollar’s global dominance.
Opinion
Is the time for refining recommendations and for a serious political debate on how best to overcome bottlenecks and improve the economic prospects of Italians.
Opinion
To help evaluate whether the market response is warranted or exaggerated, the author measured the trade impact of additional import tariffs based on standard economic theory, namely two key parameters—the tariff pass-through rate and the price elasticity of demand. The end of multilateralism seems clear, at least for trade.
Opinion
The EU needs a new approach to long-term climate strategy to ensure that EU climate policy is brought in line with the goals of Paris and takes into account recent technological and political changes. Climate policy can only succeed if it does not come out of a bureaucratic ‘black box’, but is part of an inclusive process involving a wide range of stakeholders.
Blog Post
An array of data suggests that there is a general lack of investment by all branches of the German government, despite running budget surpluses for several years. This blog post plots the progression of the public investment problem, and explores which regions, which sectors, and which levels of government have been most affected.
Blog Post
Disruptive technologies based on ICT, robots, and artificial intelligence have transformed labour markets through their important effects on employment. As the number of industrial robots continues to rise, our results imply that some measures to facilitate workforce transition and accommodate the rise of automation might be needed to maintain satisfactory labour market outcomes.
Blog Post
The Commission’s proposal for the next Multiannual Financial Framework provides a good basis for subsequent negotiations and includes a number of bold suggestions. But it has a number of deficiencies and some of the proposed tools are conceptually weak. We make proposals as to how to improve them.