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As Europe begins to face the start of its own relationship with fentanyl, it is paramount that policymakers learn from the lessons of American and Australia in crafting their response. Policymakers need to bear in mind that drug users are consumers who will respond to the changing economic environment wrought by their efforts.
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The mobile telecom sector is often taken as a case study of fragmentation of the single market leading to less investment and a loss of technological leadership. However, a closer examination of the data suggests that the fragmentation also implies more competition leading to lower prices for consumers in Europe.
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A popular thesis in policy circles is that there is an “investment gap” that Europe needs to fill to face the great challenges of our times, such as the digital and green transitions. However, the notion of the “investment gap” used by policymakers is often vague and therefore it risks legitimate a wasteful allocation of public resources.
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After revisiting the pros and cons, this paper concludes that, all in all, the rationale for introducing an ECB-sponsored digital euro for citizens, retailers, and producers, is not solidly established. Today’s highly dynamic, innovative, and efficient digital payment ecosystem does not require such an instrument, which would unavoidably duplicate existing applications and probably struggle to match private innovation.
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If Trump is elected in November 2024, the security outlook of Europe could deteriorate very fast as Russia may attempt to seek the opportunity of taking NATO off balance. It is therefore essential that the Commission and the forthcoming Defence Commissioner begin the policy planning and design well in advance and preferably as soon as they take office, as to move past preliminary negotiations and have blueprints ready for approval should the situation require it.
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There are lessons to be learned by comparing the most recent elections in France and the UK. The French electoral system is characterized by two-turn constituency elections where several short-listed candidates qualify for a second round should no-one reach more than 50% of the votes in the first round. The British system, conversely, assigns a given constituency seat to whoever wins the plurality in a given constituency, regardless of whether or not the candidate reaches 50%.
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While defense procurement and production remain fragmented across Europe and the EU and its member states invest less in their security and defense than the US, new EU and EU-sponsored initiatives demonstrate that Europeans are aware of this and attempt to reduce these shortcomings – political and fiscal obstacles notwithstanding.
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A key area of frustration for voters on both the left and the right is the poor performance of the NHS. With ever-longer waiting lists for hospital appointments and declining local services, voters are deeply concerned about the state of their beloved health service.
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Defense expenditure in EU members rose by 50% (net of inflation) between 2015 and 2023, with an increase in the expenditure-to-GDP ratio (Figure 2, referring to the current EU members). The increase involved all EU members, including not NATO members during the period under consideration.
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The European Sovereign Bond market gyrations erupted in the wake of President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a snap parliamentary vote after his party’s defeat to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in the European elections have sparked a debate on the opportunity of an activation of the Transmission Protection Mechanism (TPI).
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It is therefore possible that even the election of the Commission President will not change the overall picture, with the real game taking place whenever the European Parliament is called to vote on the fundamental choices that Europe will face in the coming years, from managing the digital and green transitions to fundamental decisions on the common defense and security policies.
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In our first forecast for the EP 2024 elections based on our model, in January 2024, we predicted a “sharp right turn”. In our latest forecast, and our final one before the election, we are still forecasting that the next EP will be considerably more right-leaning than the current one, and that the two groups to the right of the EPP will be considerably larger than they currently are.
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ASML has a global monopoly on EUV, the most advanced lithography technology that is on the Wassenaar Arrangement list of dual-use technologies and requires an export license. The Dutch government approved the export license of EUV-technology to China in 2018. The US government was not pleased and tried to press its ally to consider the security issues.
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These findings stem from a survey conducted in December 2023, encompassing nearly 13,000 EU citizens. Our dataset is representative of the EU as a whole and, more specifically, of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. In Italy, we interviewed 1,325 citizens.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 21st century: Green, Digital, Geo-Strategic and Structural.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.