Enhancing Europe’s global power: a scenario exercise with eight proposals

In the present context of intensifying competition between the major trading economies and potentially game-changing technological developments, the European Union is generally seen as the weaker party. Lacking the ‘hard power’ derived from military capabilities, it has laid claim to a ‘soft power’ of normative influence externally, yet even that is only partially utilised. Nor has Europe been able to exercise the power to coerce – ‘sharp power’ – commensurate with its economic weight as a trading bloc equivalent in size and reach to the US or China, its most prominent global competitors. How can Europe strengthen its position, and in what fields? Through a scenario exercise, we develop eight policy proposals aimed at countering Europe´s vulnerabilities and enabling it to assert its sharp and soft power more effectively. Specifically, we consider the feasibility, means and scope for their realisation. Together, they provide a transformative agenda for the EU’s position in the world

A qualitative study into the perceived barriers of accessing healthcare among a vulnerable population involved with a community centre in Romania

(1) Interview guide for family members, and (2) Interview guide for staff members. (DOCX 103 kb

The Political Economy of Failure: The Euro as an International Currency

How do international currencies get established and consolidated? What domestic and international political foundations support an international currency? And what kinds of macro-economic flows enable an international currency? In this essay we consider these perennial questions of modern IPE scholarship in reverse order to ask whether the euro could ever have become, or seek to become, a true international currency rivalling the US dollar, used not only for passive foreign exchange reserves but also as a major commercial currency outside the EU. We argue that the EU lacks the will, the ideas and the capacity to promote the euro into the status of an international currency. In this article, we concentrate on this final issue of capacity, as the will and ideas issues have already been well explored. Capacity is an issue coeval with, if not prior to, the first two issues. The EU's current institutional arrangements and its economic geography create macro-economic consequences that diminish the euro's capacity to operate as a top currency. These conflicts go beyond the well-recognized issue that the euro-zone is not an optimum currency area. Examining the euro's debilities sheds light not only on the euro's (in)capacity to rival the dollar as an international currency, but also on the future of both the euro and the dollar in the aftermath of the euro-zone crisis

Efficiency Gains of a European Banking Union

An anticipated benefit of the prospective European Banking Union is stronger supervision of European banks. Another benefit would be enhanced resolution of banks in distress. While national governments confine themselves to the domestic effects of a banking failure, a European Resolution Authority would follow a supranational approach, under which domestic and cross-border effects within Europe are incorporated. Using a model of recapitalising banks, this paper develops indicators to measure the efficiency improvement of resolution. Next, these efficiency indicators are applied to the hypothetical resolution of the top 25 European banks, which count for the vast majority of cross-border banking in Europe. Our cost-benefit analysis indicates that the UK, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands are the main beneficiaries and thus have the largest economic incentives to join Europe’s Banking Union

M3 Money Demand and Excess Liquidity in the Euro Area

Money growth in the euro area has exceeded its target since 2001. Likewise, recent empirical studies did not find evidence in favour of a stable long run money demand function. The equation appears to be increasingly unstable if more recent data are used. If the link between money balances and the macroeconomy is fragile, the rationale of monetary aggregates in the ECB strategy has to be doubted. In contrast to the bulk of the literature, we are able to identify a stable long run money demand relationship for M3 with reasonable long run behaviour. This finding is robust for different (ML and S2S) estimation methods. To obtain the result, the short run homogeneity restriction between money and prices is relaxed. In addition, a rise in the income elasticity after 2001 is taken into account. The break might be linked to the introduction of euro coins and banknotes. The monetary overhang and the real money gap do not indicate significant inflation pressures. The corresponding error correction model survives a battery of specification tests

Priors about Observables in Vector Autoregressions *

Abstract We formulate a prior about observables in a vector autoregression (VAR) and then solve the deconvolution problem for the implied prior about VAR parameters. Formulating a prior about observables is more intuitive than formulating a prior about VAR parameters directly, because VAR parameters are hard to interpret. Our numerical algorithm for approximating the implied prior about parameters works well even in high-dimensional problems and can be applied also for models other than VARs. In the empirical application we formulate a prior about growth rates of the observables in a VAR model of the United States economy. We find that this prior makes a big difference for the estimated persistence of output responses to monetary policy shocks, compared with the results of standard priors for VARs