Publications

Through its missions and governance, Horizon Europe does not meet the innovation challenge and anchors our industry in the mid-tech range. This report argues that current European efforts, while laudable, are insufficient, in both quantity and quality. Important reforms are required to enable Europe to compete in the value-creating space.

It is now over two years since Russia launched its brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Ever since those early days, a broad network of CEPR economists has been working intensively with colleagues in Ukraine and across the international research and policy communities to explore how to tackle the big economic challenges of the war and how to plan for the country’s post-war reconstruction. 
 

It is often assumed that Germany’s economic relations with China are so important that Berlin tends to take a softer stance on China-EU relations than its EU partners – or at least that this used to be the case until most recently. In particular, it is feared that German industry might be more vulnerable to disruptions of the supply of Chinese inputs than other European countries. However, this impression of a greater dependency of German industry and its supply chains from China is not borne out by the data.

The concept of green backlash has recently become more salient in the news, in part due to the widespread farmers’ protests held in a number of European countries. However, there is so far not much robust empirical evidence of an electoral penalty against governments that implement ambitious climate policies.

This essay examines the international trade policies of the two presumed Candidates for president in 2024, Joseph Biden and Donald Trump. 

This paper shows that the current operational framework of monetary policy relying on excess liquidity, together with a high level of interest rates, produces a remarkable redistribution of interest payments across the national central banks of the Eurosystem, due to the rules governing the pooling of monetary income among them. This mechanism implies significant fiscal transfers across the member countries of the euro area. Our estimates for 2023 show that their size can be in the order of several billion euro. 

The polls for the forthcoming European Parliament elections indicate a further surge of the radical and/or sovereigntist right. This result might destabilize again traditional partisan and inter-institutional equilibria and weaken the support to EU authority at a time when serious challenges and difficult choices loom large. Does the EU risk plunging back into an “existential crisis”, as it happened a decade ago in the aftermath of the 2014 elections?  

This policy brief highlights that while the green subsidies provided by the Inflation Reduction Act of the United States are homogeneous across beneficiaries, the subsidies associated with the Green Deal industrial plan are highly fragmented across European member States. We quantify the extent of resource misallocation due to this subsidy dispersion by using the model of Hsieh and Klenow (2009), calibrated on the EU electricity-producing industry. We compare both the actual allocation of subsidies, and a policy of subsidies coordinated at the EU level, to a hypothetical frictionless benchmark with no subsidies. We find that moving to coordinated subsidies can increase productivity by more than 30% with respect to the uncoordinated scenario, substantially reduce the productivity gap with the United States, and generate gains worth up to 6% of the EU value-added in the industries considered. Policy recommendations include greater EU-level coordination to minimize misallocation and enhance productivity. 

The EU-sponsored Eurobarometer polls routinely estimate support for EU defence integration between 70% and 80% of respondents, while a recent poll by the independent Bertelsmann Stiftung polling branch, Euopinions, returned a 87% support level. However, the devil is in the details: what is meant by “European defence policy” can wildly differ between people, and these simple questions present no trade-offs. 

The pattern of macroeconomic catch-up seen in the EU’s enlargement process is a remarkably positive story - if largely unsung and still incomplete. The catch-up achieved so far constitutes a key backdrop to today’s debate about further enlargement.  Without the rapid growth of the most recently acceding states it would be impossible for the EU to contemplate taking further poor members.

This paper, prepared on a request by the European Parliament, contributes to a reflection aimed at identifying ways to revive and upgrade the banking union, so as to enable it to cope with the major transformational challenges facing Europe as we move forward in the 21^st century: Green, Digital, Geo-Strategic and Structural. 

Why have energy and goods prices followed the traditional trajectory – first up, then down – but the services sector has remained plagued by inflationary pressures?

There's a prevailing skepticism regarding whether existing competition laws are equipped to curb the tendency of AI to foster prices above competitive levels, as these laws were originally crafted to target explicit collusion between companies

The euro area has been subject to a series of very different shocks, some of which, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, were unprecedented. While the ECB’s reaction to these deflationary shocks was vigorous, it persisted too long with its expansionary measures and failed to see their inflationary impact when energy prices shot up. The future is likely to bring new challenges, but climate change might not be the most important threat to price and financial stability.

This document was provided by the Economic Governance and EMU Scrutiny Unit at the request of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) ahead of the Monetary Dialogue with the ECB President on 15 February 2024.

Even though European banks do have solid Basel ratios, their profitability is insufficient to make them attractive for investors. This suggests that – from the market’s perspective - the system may not be as sound and stable as regulators believe

If the EU (and other rich countries) is genuinely interested in tackling climate change, it has to ensure that adequate funding is available for adaptation and loss and damage. It can then justifiably expect all countries to pitch in with mitigation.

EU climate bonds would meet global demand for a safe and liquid asset while increasing the speed and efficiency of EU climate investing, its resilience to sovereign crises, and the greening of investors’ portfolios and ECB's monetary policy.

The Council of the European Union (EU Council) agreed on a provisional set of new fiscal rules in its meeting on December 20, 2023, that introduces significant changes to the Commission’s proposals. The fiscal reform marks progress but is, at the same time, a lost opportunity.

Italy must be compliant ex post, and not only ex ante, with the new fiscal rules if it intends to guarantee the long-term sustainability of its public debt.

The current EU natural gas price cap on gas does not lower TTF volatility, fails to prevent price spikes, and has no significant impact on lowering inflation and commodity market volatility.

ECB independence is inconsistent with the present overreach of the institution into the economic policies of the member states, a function for which the ECB is not accountable.

The climate diplomacy surrounding the COP28 summit has taken center stage in the inaugural session of the working lunch series organized by the Institute for European Policymaking in collaboration with the European Council on Foreign Relations and the SDA Bocconi School of Management. 

A key factor that policy often overlooks is substitutability. Almost every raw material has substitutes. A combination of substitution and some stock piling would be sufficient to de-risk the supply of raw materials to a large extent.

With many new restrictive measures in place one would have expected trade to fall.  However, the most one can say is that globalisation has turned into slowbalisation. 

Elisabeth Braw, a widely respected expert in international relations and security, is currently a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. Before transitioning to research, she was a journalist, a background that informed her recent book published by Yale University Press, titled Goodbye Globalization: The Return of a Divided World.

European automakers currently face increasing pressures. While the region’s manufacturers long dominated global sales revenues, several competitors from Asia have recently moved into the top ten.  But European companies have faced similar difficulties before, and the responses of the region’s automakers and policymakers to previous challenges offer insight for the present, especially on the issues of global competition and energy transition.  

The European manufacturers have different views on the new challenge from China and the potential outcome of the EU anti-subsidy investigation although it can be expected that the Chinese advance will go to the detriment of all European manufacturers.    

The EU is encouraging other countries to follow its lead and support the green transition. This requires massive subsidies in many different sectors.  Why should the EU then complain if other countries outcompete it in terms of subsidizing the production of green goods?   

The 1960s and 1970s acute industrial conflicts were at the root of the demise of large companies in the Italian economy, setting in motion a trend of reduction in company size that continued over the ensuing decades

On December 200,2023, The European Parliament and the Council agreed on five key proposals of the New Pact on Migration and Asylum proposed by the EU Commission in September 2020 and aimed at creating a uniform system of regulations and policies around migration and asylum for the EU. The main aim of the new pact was to replace the Dublin system which relied heavily on first-country-of-entry criteria creating a burden for frontline member states.

We use the pricing mechanism of perpetual loans by our proposed European Debt Agency to determine a dynamic yield corridor that captures idiosyncratic risk and filters liquidity risk.

Without a serious change in the regulations, or a substantial investment in the bureaucratic capacity and the infrastructure for migrants, Dublin is bound to be more real on paper than in practice and many ports of entry are likely to remain in a constant state of emergency.

While increased bureaucratic documentation might make the European AI research landscape less appealing, better documentation will likely result in more thorough and potentially meaningful research.

The new framework has a higher degree of built-in flexibility. By tailoring fiscal adjustment to the situation of individual countries, the reform overcomes one major issue with the previous set of rules – namely the excessive use of flexibility clauses and overlays, to soften the otherwise too strict uniform adjustment paths.

In the absence of crystal-clear considerations to be drawn on the legal domain, it is advisable to refrain from celebrating the AI Act (as well as its alleged substantial failure) as a turning point or a historical achievement. Let the final legal provisions speak, first.

The Council and High Representative for foreign Affairs must ensure that Common Foreign and Security Policy do not deprive individuals of their rights, and must, as a matter of EU constitutional law, include in all instruments a jurisdictional clause indicating the national court responsible to ensure effective judicial protection.

If the European Union wants to have a global economic weight, it must equip itself with great European banking champions capable of attracting capital globally and able to support Europe as a development platform.

If the European Union wants to have a global economic weight, it must equip itself with great European banking champions capable of attracting capital globally and able to support Europe as a development platform.

Inflation rates in the euro area and US increased sharply in 2022, in part following large energy price shocks. This column analyses the pass-through from energy prices to core inflation since the 1970s for the US and Germany. It shows that this pass-through is not constant over time, but time-varying. Pass-through from energy to inflation during the 1970s was high in the US, but not in Germany. Both countries experienced high pass-through in 2022, but this has declined in the most recent quarters, consistent with a return to more normal inflation dynamics.

As the discussion on the next EU enlargement that might include Ukraine in the bloc proceeds, the support of European citizens to support Ukrainians remains solid but not as solid as in the recent past. Eupinions - a Bertelsman Stigtung project - has monitored how the EU sentiment has evolved towards Ukraine over 18 months.

We identify specific industrial products that are projected to be in high demand in the EU and can be realistically produced given North African countries’ existing capabilities. Specializing in these products, North African countries can diversify their export basket, which has been shown to correlate positively with economic development.

The EU should be ready to offer candidate countries at least participation in the single market, partial access to the EU's budget, and observer status in EU institutions by 2030.

There is no doubt that monetary policy reacted late to the rising inflationary pressures experienced in 2021-22. The major central banks subsequently caught up rapidly and hiked interest rates at an unprecedented pace. However, as inflation reached its peak at the end of 2022 and has been falling since then, central banks may once again be late in adjusting their policies.

On October 30, 2023, the Biden Administration issued the Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence Executive Order 14110, which marks a key development in the global race to regulate AI

The way the EU Commission and governments envisage launching future enlargements without strengthening the EU in parallel could have negative consequences for all Europeans, in the EU and in candidate countries.

The US and the euro area have similar headline inflation rates, but very different drivers. In the US, inflation is mainly driven by housing costs. By contrast in the euro area energy now provides an important negative element, that is offset to a large extent by still increasing food prices

Whatever comes out of this election result, Dutch politics has become more volatile and complex in the coming years. This will likely have consequences not only for the Netherlands but also for the EU

La Nota di aggiornamento del Documento di Economia e Finanza indica che la stabilizzazione del debito pubblico italiano richiede il raggiungimento di un surplus primario superiore al 3% del Pil nel giro dei prossimi 3-4 anni. Una manovra restrittiva di questo tipo non ha precedenti storici.

On November 13, the Institute for European Policymaking co-organized with IAI, the Istituto per gli Affari Internazionali, an event in Rome dedicated to discussing the implication of the US Industrial Reduction Act on European industries and, specifically, on Italian companies.

The EU negotiating delegation at the UN Dubai conference will put forward initiatives to phase out CO2-emitting fossil fuels and fossil fuel subsidies.

On November 9th, the Institute for European Policymaking organized its first in-person event in Brussels: The Impact of IRA on the EU Industrial Policy: Challenging Conventional Wisdom.

Ralph Ossa, a professor of Economics at the University of Zurich currently on leave, has been appointed as the WTO chief economist in the most challenging time for the organization.  In the first World Trade Report since his appointment, Ralph Ossa and his colleagues challenge the prevalent narrative of an inevitable decline of globalization that we have experienced in the last three decades.  

Our starting point was the stark increase in non-energy price inflation, which is the key element for the ECB since monetary policy cannot do anything about energy prices. Could the ECB have foreseen this development? Our analysis suggests that this would have been difficult based on past experience. 

A continuous political drive will be necessary, at all levels of government, to guarantee enough momentum in terms of both the necessary implementation of the approved reforms, and the timely disbursement of the sum related to already authorized public investments.

Our analysis indicates that the budgetary documents presented by the Italian government are based on excessively optimistic forecasts regarding GDP growth, the effectiveness of budgetary measures and the revenues connected to privatizations. As a result, the very small projected decline in the public debt/GDP ratio is not likely.

How can broad public support for policy reforms and gridlock be overcome? The main mechanism for achieving this in political systems across the democratic world is open competition for the main executive office: the President of the Commission, in the case of the EU.  

​​​​​​In the discussion on monetary policy in the presence of supply shocks, we focus on the Euro area to understand the recent wave of inflation.

La Nota di Aggiornamento del DEF (Nadef) e la bozza della Legge di Bilancio del Governo Meloni indicano obiettivi e programmi di politica economica sulla cui credibilità gravano varie ipoteche. Le difficili condizioni dell’economia internazionale e l’intrinseca debolezza della finanza pubblica italiana possono mettere in questione gli impegni dichiarati dal governo, con implicazioni per la stabilità finanziaria del paese.

As the path to fiscal sustainability narrows, so does Italy’s political capital to credibly advocate a radical reform of EU fiscal rules. Italy's primary balance will need to improve by 0.9% of GDP each year in both 2025 and 2026: similarly sized improvements were recorded in only 3 of the 20 years before the pandemic (2 of which were at the height of the Eurozone crisis, in 2011 and 2012).

Rebuilding trust in the EU would entail the recognition that the winners of yesterday are not the winners of today or tomorrow. In a world of endemic uncertainty and repeated shocks, to avoid zero-sum games, an insurance-based solidarity is needed where support will depend on who suffers more from the shocks.  

The EU directives on Women on Boards and on Pay Transparency have a clear objective: to reduce gender gaps in European countries. Assessing their effectiveness requires a thorough understanding of the outcomes of similar policies based on research.

To understand the feasibility of further integration, we study the extent and evolution of cultural and policy views heterogeneity in Europe leveraging international survey data. We calculate the distribution of cultural and policy views distance both across and within countries.  We find that cultural heterogeneity has increased along both dimensions in the past but has decreased in the most recent wave.

The ongoing conversation among the European Union institutions that started when the Commission released its proposal also features a variety of views on which (and how many) authorities both at EU level and at Member State should lead the governance of AI.

The reduction in trade needed to achieve our climate ambitions would be out of reach. Border Carbon Adjustment is the way to go, but leakages remain sizeable.

The reduction in trade needed to achieve our climate ambitions would be out of reach. Border Carbon Adjustment is the way to go, but leakages remain sizeable.

Federal Reserve monetary policy has been more expansionary than the one predicted by the rule until the second quarter of 2022, then this tendency was reversed.  The evidence is very different for the case of the Euro area, where the observed policy rates are consistently below those predicted by the model and fluctuate outside the range compatible with the model-related uncertainty.

Federal Reserve monetary policy has been more expansionary than the one predicted by the rule until the second quarter of 2022, then this tendency was reversed.  The evidence is very different for the case of the Euro area, where the observed policy rates are consistently below those predicted by the model and fluctuate outside the range compatible with the model-related uncertainty.

The former managing director of the ESM discusses the long-term consequences of the Euro crisis and its aftermath.

The former managing director of the ESM discusses the long-term consequences of the Euro crisis and its aftermath.

While American and European central bankers might prefer to focus on their progress in tamping down inflation, there is no use pretending that they did not play a significant role in creating the problem.

While American and European central bankers might prefer to focus on their progress in tamping down inflation, there is no use pretending that they did not play a significant role in creating the problem.

The ratification of the modified ESM treaty by the Greek parliament took place easily, and smoothly, without the usual political tensions. The text was submitted to the plenary on the 28th of June 2021 and a week later, on July 6th, it was adopted by a large majority. Only the Greek Communist Party and minor parties of the extreme left and right voted against it. It was practically a non-issue for the mainstream Greek political parties and Greek citizens. Why so?

With the establishment of the ESM, the original form of the states' own responsibility for their budgetary policy (no bailout clause), which was central to Germany, has been permanently softened.

While banks are now profiting from the new interest rate scenario, the ultimate long-term effect of heightened interest rates on bank performance remains uncertain.

L'Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), firmato dal Presidente degli Stati Uniti Joe Biden quasi un anno fa (agosto 2022), è il primo importante provvedimento per contrastare il cambiamento climatico che il parlamento degli Stati Uniti abbia mai approvato. La ragione principale di questo successo è che l’IRA non impone oneri all’industria USA ma garantisce molti sussidi.

Bite-back occurs when an innovation has unexpected and unintended effects. It is probably the case that in most cases such consequences are negative, but that is not invariably the case. Bite-back happens because a new technology is by definition an exploration into the unknown, and so it is impossible to predict precisely whether it will do more or less of just very different things from what it was meant to do.

A detailed analysis suggests that the handicap for European producers in the US market will be limited. This small negative effect is likely to be overwhelmed by the much-increased market, implying that the IRA leads to increased opportunities for exports of electric vehicles and renewable inputs to the US. Our calculations suggest that over time the US market for electric vehicles could increase by a factor of 4 and renewables installations should also increase by hundreds of percent. A commentary by Daniel Gros.

In this Working Document, we do not try to provide an overall evaluation of the IRA or its cost-effectiveness with regard to addressing climate change and US emissions. Rather, we investigate its impact on the US market and on EU export opportunities, concentrating on the material content of the IRA – not its intention.

As a possible reform of its dispute settlement procedures, the WTO membership should consider carving out trade actions taken under the national security exception (GATT Article XXI) as a case where trading partners have the right to bring non-violation claims but do not have the right to bring violation claims.

The proliferation of advanced generative AI models has unequivocally highlighted what was already foreseeable since the advent of the algorithmic era. The traditional notion of "consent" is no longer a viable proposition in the context of an algorithmic society. Given the increasing sophistication of emerging AI generative models, which legal basis could be a reasonable alternative?

American protectionism has been reinvented in the name of “national security”. Yet, the belief that a country can achieve its own “nationally security” unilaterally is debatable.

Given the common monetary policy in Europe, term premia on bonds issued by different countries are an immediate gauge of the heterogeneity in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in Europe and of the need for intervention to protect the Euro area against it.

Given the common monetary policy in Europe, term premia on bonds issued by different countries are an immediate gauge of the heterogeneity in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in Europe and of the need for intervention to protect the Euro area against it.

The dynamics of nominal government bond yields at different maturities play a central role in shaping the response of the real economy to monetary and fiscal policy interventions. Yields can be decomposed into two unobservable components: the sequence of expected one-period rates and the term-premia.

So much international trade happens in dollars that it would be very difficult to turn the tide against the currency any time soon.

So much international trade happens in dollars that it would be very difficult to turn the tide against the currency any time soon.

If Russia's invasion and assault on Ukraine can be unequivocally classified as aggression, then the response to this violation must also adhere to international legal standards.

A concise introduction into the workings of large language models is presented. We start with an introduction to the attention mechanism, the core of the transformer architecture, which is then followed by a discussion of the steps needed to engineer the base model, a generatively pretrained transfromers (GPT), to a working chatbot like ChatGPT.

“You can do some pretty impressive things with AI as a technological platform, but I am not necessarily an optimist because there are also some very negative paths that AI could take as a technology. We have a confluence of factors that make the negative use of this technology much more probable than positive use”, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu argues.

Il dibattito sulla riforma del Meccanismo Europeo di Stabilità (MES) - che l’Italia rimane l’unico Paese UE a non avere ratificato - è tornato al centro del dibattito politico italiano. All’interno della maggioranza di governo sembrano coesistere due linee di opposizione alla ratifica – una “ideologica” e una “strategica”. Entrambe sono fallaci.