Contenu du sommaire : Towards a better governance in the EU?

The European debt crisis triggered a debate on the lacking components of the EU and EMU integration architecture. Many believe that a common currency requires closer fiscal and political integration as a condition for its survival. This opinion is not necessarily supported by the experience of other monetary unions, especially those created by sovereign states. On the other hand, the current EU integration architecture already contains several elements of fiscal union. Furthermore, in several important policy areas such as financial supervision, defense, security, border protection, foreign policy, environmental protection, and climate change, the centralization of tasks and resources at the Union level could offer increasing returns to scale and a better chance to address pan-European externalities. This applies to the entire EU, not only to the Eurozone. Each variant of fiscal integration must be based on sound foundations of fiscal discipline. Market discipline, i.e., the danger of sovereign default, supplemented by clear and consistently enforced fiscal rules is the best solution to this problem. Unfortunately, since 2010, the “no bail out” principle has been replaced by a policy of conditional bailout of governments in fiscal trouble. Some proposals, such as eurobonds or the lender of last resort to governments, go even further in this direction, and threaten to build a dysfunctional fiscal union.

The economic crisis which started in 2008 led to a strong rise in public debts. The sovereign debt crisis in euro area southern countries broke the unity of the euro area and weakened the “single currency” concept. The paper shows that this situation is not due to a lack of fiscal discipline in Europe, but to drifts in financial capitalism and to an inappropriately designed euro area economic policy framework. Public debts homogeneity needs to be resettled in Europe. European public debts should become safe assets again, and should not be subject to financial markets' assessment. EU Member States should not be requested to pay for past sins through austerity measures, and should not strengthen fiscal discipline through rules lacking economic rationale. The paper deals with recent proposals made to improve euro area governance (redemption fund, European Treasury, eurobonds, public debt guarantee by the ECB). The paper advocates for a full guarantee of government bonds for the Member States who commit to an economic policy coordination process, which should target GDP growth and coordinated reduction of imbalances.

We project the path of the public debt and primary balances for a number of countries in the euro area under a fiscal rule based on a set of estimated fiscal policy reaction functions. Our fiscal rule represents a fiscal analogue to a well-known monetary policy rule, and it is calibrated using country-specific as well as euro area-wide parameter estimates. We then forecast the dynamics of the fiscal aggregates under different convergence, growth, and interest rate scenarios and investigate the implications of these scenarios in projecting the future path of fiscal aggregates. We argue that our forecasting methodology may be used to deliver insights into the medium-run effects of different fiscal policy rules and to provide some early warning of future fiscal pressures.

It is well-known that estimates of fiscal policy effects differ a lot. In this paper we try get some idea of the magnitude of these differences and the underlying reasons for these differences. In the European Monetary Union we face wide cross-country differences in fiscal institutions and key fiscal parameters, some of which may also vary over time (business cycle). Moreover, these effects may also depend on trade spillover effects and thus on the extent of policy coordination. Our empirical analyses make use of data for 15 EU countries, mainly for the period 1970-2011. The results clearly indicate that fiscal multipliers are much larger during economic recessions. By contrast, the policy coordination-effects appear to be more homogenous, although it turns out that small countries may benefit more from coordination. Still, cross-country differences seem to dominate these average features of the results.

Recent evidence has renewed views on the size of fiscal multipliers. It is notably emphasized that fiscal multipliers are higher in times of crisis. Starting from this literature, we develop a simple and tractable model to deal with the fiscal strategy led by euro area countries. Constrained by fiscal rules and by speculative attacks in financial markets, euro area members have adopted restrictive fiscal policies despite strong negative output gaps. Based on the model, we present simulations to determine the path of public debt given the current expected consolidation. Our simulations suggest that despite strong austerity measures, not all countries would be able to reach the 60% debt-to-GDP. If fiscal multipliers vary along the business cycle, this would give a strong case for delaying austerity. This alternative scenario is considered. Our results show not only that delaying austerity would improve growth perspectives and would not be incompatible with public debt converging to 60% of GDP.

In June 2012 European Council launched the banking union as a new project expected to contribute to solve the euro area crisis. Is banking union a necessary supplement to monetary union or a new rush forward? A banking union would break the link between the sovereign debt crisis and the banking crisis, by asking the ECB to supervise banks, by establishing common mechanisms to solve banking crises, and by encouraging banks to diversify their activities. The banking union project is based on three pillars: a Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), a Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM), a European Deposit Guarantee Scheme (EDGS). Each of these pillars raises specific problems. Some are related to the current crisis (can deposits in euro area countries facing difficulties be guaranteed?); some other issues are related to the EU complexity (should the banking union include all EU member states? Who will decide on banking regulations?), some other issues are related to the EU specificity (is the banking union a step towards more federalism?); the more stringent are related to structural choices regarding the European banking system. Banks' solvency and ability to lend, would depend primarily on their capital ratios, and thus on financial markets' sentiment. The links between the government, firms, households and domestic banks would be cut, which is questionable. Will governments be able tomorrow to intervene to influence bank lending policies, or to settle specific public banks? An opposite strategy could be promoted: restructuring the banking sector, and isolating retail banking from risky activities. Retail banks would focus on lending to domestic agents, and their solvency would be guaranteed by the interdiction to run risky activities on financial markets. Can European peoples leave such strategic choices in the hands of the ECB?

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on the anticipated long-term impact of the post-crisis regulatory environment on bank stability and efficiency, with a focus on Central and Eastern European (CEE) banks. The main research question is whether relatively stable CEE banks, operating in an unstable global environment, will be negatively affected by post-crisis European regulatory architecture. To answer this question, this paper analyses how CEE banks performed in two different periods: the pre-crisis period of dynamic credit market expansion and the period of global economic slowdown after 2008 crisis. Bank efficiency and performance is measured using DEA methodology, competitive conditions' measures (H-statistics) and Z-score index.

The different monetary regime choices of two strikingly similar economies Finland and Sweden have created a particularly interesting testing ground for the benefits of the EMU. We assess the effects of the regime choice by simulating the behaviour of the Swedish economy with National Institute's Global Econometric Model (NiGEM) on the assumption that Sweden had joined the EMU in 1999. The simulation exercise suggests that the independent monetary regime reduced the impact of the global shock on Sweden, but cannot explain the growth gap between Sweden and Finland since 2012. Our results suggest that the different choices with regard to the EMU have not affected the macroeconomic outcomes very much.

The Euro Plus Pact was approved by 23 EU countries in March 2011. The Pact stipulates a range of quantitative targets meant to strengthen competitiveness and convergence with the ultimate aim of preventing the accumulation of unsustainable financial imbalances. This paper uses Granger causality tests and vector autoregressive models to assess the short-term linkages between changes in the relative unit labour cost and changes in the current account balance. The sample consists of data for 27 EU countries for the period 1995–2012. The main finding is that changes in the current account balance precedes changes in relative unit labour costs, while there is no discernable effect in the opposite direction. This suggests that the divergence in the unit labour cost between the countries in Northern Europe and countries in Southern and Central and Eastern Europe prior to the global financial crisis partly was the result of capital flows from the core of Europe to its periphery. The results also suggest that measures in the Euro Plus Pact to restrain unit labour costs may not have immediate effects on possible current account imbalances.

In the negotiations on the EU's budget for 2014 to 2020 member countries almost exclusively focused on individual direct benefits in terms of net financial positions. Indirect benefits from EU membership, EU enlargement and introduction of the euro as well as benefits from EU expenditures other than direct transfers to member states (i.e. expenditures with “European value added”, which indirectly benefit all member states and the EU as a whole, e.g. expenditures for research and development, education, green technologies and energy) were neglected. As a result potential indirect benefits from expanding the overall volume of the EU budget volume, to adjust it to the growing challenges the EU is facing, played a minor role in individual countries' views on a desirable EU budget: as did the “European value added” which could be realised by a shift of expenditures away from expenditure categories mainly benefiting individual countries directly (e.g. common agriculture payments) to expenditure categories which indirectly benefit member states and the EU as a whole (e.g. expenditures for research and development, education, or green technologies and energy).A fundamental reform of EU expenditures towards a sustainable structure requires a fundamental reform of the EU's system of own resources. Only by replacing a substantial part of national contributions by own EU taxes can the narrow focus on financial flows to and from the EU budget be broadened to include also indirect benefits for individual member countries and the EU as a whole. After reviewing the most important deficits of the EU's current system of own resources, the paper establishes criteria for “good” EU taxes and applies these to a number of candidates for EU taxes (e.g. a tax on financial transactions or on carbon dioxide emissions) to assess their suitability as new revenue sources for the EU.