Policy Brief
What are the arguments for and against centralisation of insurance supervision? What would be the scope of a possible insurance union, and what would the legal basis be? How rapid should the move to insurance union be? This Policy Brief sets out to answer these questions.
Policy Contribution
Following the financial crisis, the question of how to handle a big bank’s collapse has come to the fore. This Policy Contribution evaluates the obstacles to resolvability that the legal and operational structures of the large euro-area banks could pose to the European Union’s new resolution regime.
Blueprint
This Blueprint offers an in-depth analysis of inequalities of income and wealth in the EU, as well as their causes and consequences. How evenly are the benefits of growth distributed in our economies, and what does this mean for fairness and social mobility? How could and should policymakers react?
External Publication
How can the EU product safety and compliance framework help promote product durability and tackle planned obsolescence, foster the production of more sustainable products, and achieve more transparent supply chains for consumers? Product longevity can play a useful role in achieving the Paris Agreement goals – material efficiency is an important contributor to energy efficiency and is also important in its own right. The product safety and compliance instruments available at European level can contribute to these efforts, if wisely applied.
Blog Post
Self-employed workers are hardest-hit by COVID-19 lockdowns. Yet they often receive less government support than salaried employees. Is the disparity justified?
Opinion
To fight the Covid-19 pandemic, best practice responses in Africa need to be implemented around international collaboration. These include the need to activate emergency operations centres, to establish a surge capacity in health systems, and to mitigate the economic and social consequences of the pandemic.
Blog Post
Using online searches for restaurants as a proxy to assess whether and to what extent individuals were practicing social distancing before strict lockdown measures, we identify substantial differences between countries. In some countries, including Denmark and Portugal, searches for restaurants were considerably down before restaurant restrictions were put in place. Countries where social distancing started earlier, regardless of when policies were enacted, can expect a flatter coronavirus curve.
Blog Post
Government policy faces various challenges. Before the COVID-19 outbreak, the European Union set ambitious targets to reduce carbon emissions. Now in the midst of the pandemic, the EU has temporarily lifted state-aid rules allowing governments to steer companies through the crisis and to minimise job losses using public money. This column suggests combining these policies by attaching green conditions to state aid. In that way, we can aim for a green recovery.
Opinion
We had not seen a common challenge as clear as this pandemic. The sum of national actions and programs is likely to be insufficient.
Podcast
Economics seems to be full of myths that are hard to debunk. Will robots take our jobs? Are trade deficits bad? Is China such a big economy simply because of the size of its population? This week, Nicholas Barrett, Maria Demertzis, Marta Domínguez-Jímenez and Niclas Poitiers put on the detective cap and become Bruegel's own economic mythbusters.
Working Paper
This paper presents unprecedented exchange rate forecasting results based upon a new model which approximates the gap between the fundamental equilibrium exchange rate and the actual exchange rate with the long-maturity forward exchange rate.
Opinion
We are not in normal times and we have to surpass, albeit only for the duration of the COVID-19 shock, the hurdles that did not allow the euro-area to endow itself of a common fiscal policy.
Opinion
Because even thriving companies can be killed in a matter of weeks by a recession of the magnitude now confronting the world, advanced-economy governments have reacted in a remarkably similar fashion to the COVID-19 crisis. But extending liquidity lifelines to private businesses and supporting idled workers assumes a short crisis.
Podcast
From the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) to "coronabonds", the EU seems to be struggling to find an appropriate mechanism to tackle the economic crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic. What is really the best option? And how do we ensure that, once the pandemic is over, we return to sustainable debt levels and competitive economies? This week, Giuseppe Porcaro is joined by Lucrezia Reichlin, professor of Economics at the London Business School, Grégory Claeys and Guntram Wolff to discuss the macroeconomic policy response to the COVID-19 crisis.
Opinion
While Asian markets are in a sea of red, mainland China, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Taiwan are all defying the gravity.