An action plan for the European leaders

At the extraordinary EU Council of 21 July European leaders have to accomplish a triple-mission. First, they should pave the way to restoring solvency in Greece by initiating debt reduction. Softening the Greek debt burden implies i) reducing the interest rate on official lending, ii) requesting from the EFSF support for an immediate bond buy-back programme, and iii) asking the ESRB for an immediate evaluation of the risks to financial stability involved in a future restructuring of the sovereign debts in the euro area. Second, they should promote immediate growth-enhancing measures to be financed through unused EU structural funds and EIB loans (â?¬16bn). The available funds shall be used to i) raise the quality of higher education, ii) finance wage subsidies in manufacturing and tourism so as to generate an internal devaluation at contained domestic-demand costs; and ii) create research laboratories (i.e. lighthouse innovation projects) that would support an upgrading of the Greek value chain. Third, they should address risks to financial stability in the euro zone by breaking the vicious circle between sovereign debt and banking risk. The EFSF should be able to guarantee national deposit insurance schemes; at the same time, the European Banking Authority should assume stronger supervisory powers. This is an immediate action plans but of course more ambitious reforms are necessary down the road.

An evaluation of IMF surveillance of the euro area

The euro-area crisis has exposed deep deficiencies in the governance of European Economic and Monetary Union. However, crisis prevention in, and surveillance of, the euro area are not only the responsibility of European authorities. As members of the International Monetary Fund, all euro-areacountries are also subject to regular bilateral IMF surveillance. The currency union as a whole is also subject to regular IMF surveillance.This report analyses the IMFâ??s surveillance of the euro area. We find that it suffered from severe shortcomings in the run-up to the financial crisis, but after the start of the crisis in 2008, IMF surveillance of the euro area greatly improved, with the IMF correctly proposing measures to counter depression risks and warning about banking sector problems. By the time the sovereign-debt crisis hit the currency union in early 2010, the IMF was ready to play aninfluential role. The slow European response meant this was indispensable.

Social capital and rural innovation process. The evaluation of the measure 124 \u201cCooperation for Development of New Products, Processes and Technologies in the Agriculture, Food and Forestry Sector\u201d in the Umbria Region (Italy)

The most recent theories on innovation point out the role of social networks, demonstrating how knowledge is intertwined with network communities and social capital represents an essential factor to comprehend innovation. The social network dimension of the innovation process is also acknowledged in the actual definition of an agricultural innovation system (AIS). This study attempts to assess the role played by social capital in agricultural innovation projects co-financed by the Measure 124 of the Rural Development Program (2007-2013) of the Umbria Region (Italy), based on the analysis of 5 evaluation criteria (relevance, innovation, effectiveness, sustainability, and social capital) in relation to 8 selected projects. The obtained results confirm the validity of the proposed methodology both for the purpose of internal monitoring of the project and for the assessment of the measure on the basis of tangible and intangible factors, such as social capital

THE THREATS TO THE EUROPEAN UNION’S ECONOMIC SOVEREIGNTY Memo to the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Bruegel Policy Brief

Economics used to play a limited role in foreign policy, which was about wars, conflicts and human disasters – and how to avoid them. But neither China nor the United States now separates economics from geopolitics. The competition between them is simultaneously an economic competition and a security competition. This is a threat to the multilateral system the European Union has relied on for nearly seven decades and to the EU’s separation of external economic relationships from geopolitics. You and your Commission colleagues must redefine for the EU its concept of economic sovereignty and the instruments it needs to defend and promote it

Propping up Europe?

The Bank of England, the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) have responded to the crisis with exceptional initiatives resulting in a major increase in their balance sheets. After the ECB's end-2011 launch of three-year bank refinancing (LTRO), there has been speculation that all three have de facto embarked on 'quantitative easing'. However, major differences remain: the Bank of England and Fed have mostly relied on large-scale purchases of government bonds, while the ECB has relied on lending to financial institutions with repurchase agreements of collateral (repos). The LTRO has successfully mitigated funding needs and reduced interbank stress, and has had a significant impact on sovereign bond yields in southern euro-area countries, and increased southern banks' government debt holdings, while northern banks have reduced sovereign exposure. The LTRO has had only weak effects on funding for households and non-financial corporations; credit dynamics remain weak particularly in the southern euro area. Underlying structural problems relating to banks, the macroeconomic adjustment and the euro area's governance need to be addressed before financial stability and economic growth can return. Monetary policy cannot fundamentally address these problems and is made less effective by economic/institutional heterogeneity

Options for a Euro-area fiscal capacity

Europe has responded to the crisis with strengthened budgetary and macroeconomic surveillance, the creation of the European Stability Mechanism, liquidity provisioning by resilient economies and the European Central Bank and a process towards a banking union. However, a monetary union requires some form of budget for fiscal stabilisation in case of shocks, and as a backstop to the banking union. This paper compares four quantitatively different schemes of fiscal stabilisation and proposes a new scheme based on GDP-indexed bonds. The options considered are: (i) A federal budget with unemployment and corporate taxes shifted to euro-area level; (ii) a support scheme based on deviations from potential output;(iii) an insurance scheme via which governments would issue bonds indexed to GDP, and (iv) a scheme in which access to jointly guaranteed borrowing is combined with gradual withdrawal of fiscal sovereignty. Our comparison is based on strong assumptions. We carry out a preliminary, limited simulation of how the debt-to-GDP ratio would have developed between 2008-14 under the four schemes for Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and an 'average' country.The schemes have varying implications in each case for debt sustainability

An action plan for Europe's leaders

At the extraordinary EU Council of 21 July European leaders have to accomplish a triple-mission. First, they should pave the way to restoring solvency in Greece by initiating debt reduction. Softening the Greek debt burden implies i) reducing the interest rate on official lending, ii) requesting from the EFSF support for an immediate bond buy-back programme, and iii) asking the ESRB for an immediate evaluation of the risks to financial stability involved in a future restructuring of the sovereign debts in the euro area. Second, they should promote immediate growth-enhancing measures to be financed through unused EU structural funds and EIB loans (16bn). The available funds shall be used to i) raise the quality of higher education, ii) finance wage subsidies in manufacturing and tourism so as to generate an internal devaluation at contained domestic-demand costs; and ii) create research laboratories (i.e. lighthouse innovation projects) that would support an upgrading of the Greek value chain. Third, they should address risks to financial stability in the euro zone by breaking the vicious circle between sovereign debt and banking risk. The EFSF should be able to guarantee national deposit insurance schemes; at the same time, the European Banking Authority should assume stronger supervisory powers. This is an immediate action plans but of course more ambitious reforms are necessary down the road