Suchergebnisse

The 'Five Presidents Report' cited in the title acknowledges that an important driver of the European economic crisis has been the faulty original design of the Monetary Union, and that substantial steps are urgently needed towards the creation of truly supranational institutions. Yet, economists tend to neglect that however compelling economic analyses may be, the stumbling block on the way of the reform of the Monetary Union is political will, and that in democracies the ultimate source of political will comes from electors. In this paper, first of all the authors wish to bring to the economists' attention some recent analyses of citizens' attitudes towards Europe from political science. Then, by cross-referencing the results of the 2014 elections of the European Parliament with Eurobarometer opinion polls eliciting judgements for the EU vis-à-vis home countries and an indicator of economic pain, the authors show the presence of a geo-economic-political cleavage across four groups of countries. This is more complex, and perhaps worse, than the simplistic divide between 'North' and 'South' or 'Core' and 'Periphery'. The main implication is that the EU experiences a stalemate between 'more Europe vs. less Europe' at the level of peoples, which seriously undermines support for further integration 'from below'.

The aim of the 'Five Presidents Report' cited in the title acknowledges that an important driver of the European economic crisis has been the faulty original design of the Monetary Union, and that substantial steps are urgently needed towards the creation of truly supranational institutions. Yet economists tend to neglect that however compelling economic analyses may be, the stumbling block on the way of the reform of the Monetary Union is political will, and that in democracies the ultimate source of political will comes from electors. In this paper, first of all the authors wish to bring to the economists' attention some recent analyses of citizens' attitudes towards Europe from political science. Then, by cross-referencing the results of the 2014 elections of the European Parliament with Eurobarometer opinion polls eliciting judgements for the EU vis-à-vis home countries and an indicator of economic pain, they show the presence of a geo-economicpolitical cleavage across four groups of countries. This is more complex, and perhaps worse, than the simplistic divide between 'North' and 'South' or 'Core' and 'Periphery'. The main implication is that the EU experiences a stalemate between 'more Europe vs. less Europe' at the level of peoples, which seriously undermines support for further integration 'from below'.

The paper investigates how European fiscal authorities behaved in the last decades - namely, und er the constraint posited by the European Monetary Systems during the I 980s, the Maastricht Treaty during the 1990s, and the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) later on - also taking into account monetary and fiscal policy interactions. We argue that the traditional measure used for evaluating fiscal policy - the cyclically-adjusted public budget (CAPB) - is a too rough indicator of the fiscal stance as a function of the two objectives of output stabilization and debt decumulation. We construct two theoretical appraisals of the fiscal rule pursued by the government - Tax Smoothing and Expenditure Smoothing-and use them as dependent variables in our econometric estimates. Under quite plausible conditions, the compliance with the 3% limit on the public deficit / GOP ratio imposed by the SGP could imply the renounce during a downswing, not only to pursue discretionary fiscal policy but also to output stabilization by a utomatic stabilizers. We conclude that fiscal s ustainability - that is the compliance with the intertemporal public budget constraint which is required to the fiscal authorities of the European Monetary Union (EMU) - stresses the objective of debtdecumulation, thus creating a trade-off with the objective of output stabilization, especially for the high-debt EMU countries.

The scientific evaluation of the relationship between growth, redistribution,
and the income share of the middle class is still in its infancy. This article
aims to investigate how the drivers of economic growth impinge on market
income distribution and how the middle class has a role in deciding the level
of redistribution. Our strategy is to dodge the reverse causality problem,
stemming from the bi-directional relation between income distribution and
growth, by exploiting the peculiar feature of different indicators of income
dispersion focused on the middle income group. The findings reveal that
market forces and redistributive policies are both pivotal in shaping the
evolution of income dispersion and in particular the income share of the
middle class, over the growth process. The ability of redistributive policies
to counteract the ongoing increase in income inequality seems to depend
not only on the political pressure exerted by an impoverishing median voter
but also on the expansion of fiscal revenues after sustained Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) growth.

AbstractThe paper provides a rational explanation for the redistribution paradox, whereby low‐income individuals seeking more social security prefer a lower taxation although this might imply a reduced welfare. A simple model of tax transfer and redistribution is presented, with various agents facing two different unemployment probabilities. We investigate how the preferred tax rate changes with the probability of being unemployed. We show that, when the probability of unemployment for the less‐skilled correlates negatively with that of the highly skilled, the relationship with the tax rate is not monotonic and depends on the level of risk aversion. This theoretical framework is confirmed in an empirical investigation based on microeconomic data, and in a robustness test based on macroeconomic data.