Blog Post
Joint EU borrowing to boost the recovery, if not treated as national deficit and debt, will substantially ease rules-based fiscal adjustment needs in southern and eastern Europe, but not in western and northern Europe.
Blog Post
The 2020 pandemic economic shock has led to reassessment of fiscal policy measures in 2018 and earlier, because of faulty measurement of unobserved output gaps and structural balances. The current period of suspension of EU fiscal rules should be used to design a better fiscal framework.
Opinion
€1 trillion isn't enough for the European Green Deal and the EU's fiscal framework is constraining public investment. "Mrs Merkel, tear down this rule".
Blog Post
A prominent team from DG ECFIN of the European Commission challenged some of the criticisms of the EU’s methodology for estimating potential output and output gaps, as well as their role in the EU fiscal framework. In this post, I conclude that their responses to the criticisms they considered are questionable. More importantly, they overlook serious problems with the EU’s potential output methodology.
Policy Contribution
In this Policy Contribution prepared for the French Conseil d’Analyse Économique, the authors assess current European fiscal rules and propose a major simplification. They recommend substituting the numerous rules with a new simple one, which would help reconcile fiscal prudence and macroeconomic stabilisation of the economy.
Podcast
In this Director’s Cut of ‘The Sound of Economics’, Guntram Wolff welcomes Bruegel research fellow Grégory Claeys to assess how the new Italian budget proposals measure up against the existing EU fiscal rules.
Blog Post
The Italian government has announced an increase of its deficit for 2019, breaking the commitment from the previous government to decrease it to 0.8% next year. This blog post explores the options for the European Commission and the procedures prescribed by the European fiscal framework in this case.
Blog Post
Researchers have often highlighted the problematic nature of the currently very complex EU fiscal framework. Here we review economists’ views on how it should be changed.
Blog Post
Proposals for reforming the euro area back on the agenda. An overhaul of the European fiscal rules should be on high on this agenda, because the current fiscal framework has not worked well. This column proposes substituting the numerous and complex present rules with a new, simple rule focused on limiting annual growth rate of expenditures.
Past Event
This event will discuss reforming Europe's fiscal framework in order to make it less complex and more effective.
Past Event
This event will discuss the 2019 Fiscal Stance, which assesses the current macroeconomic situation and offers advice for the future.
Past Event
This event will feature the presentation of the Economic Survey of the European Union 2018 and Economic Survey of the Euro Area 2018.
