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This book offers a criticalperspective from which to observe evolution of the Euro Area and the European Union in these times of growing economic and political conflict. Key implications of design failures in the Euro Area (i.e. incorrect diagnostics ofthe public finance crisis, single monetary policy failure, heterogeneous macroeconomic environment, asymmetry in macroeconomic policies, obstacles forpolicy coordination) and their contribution to the excessive external andinternal economic imbalances will be critically discussed from the economic, policy and institutional perspectives. This critical insight is used to examineboth institutional asset and economic performance of Europe after the crisis, moving from the authors' shared perspective that the crisis revealed the weakaspects of the whole architecture of the European Union. The economic crisis revealed theexistence of different forms of imbalances inside the Eurozone and highlighted the flaws of the institutional architecture of economic policy in Europe. The greater fragility of some countries in respect to others has triggered abackward process in which national interests have started to prevail over those of both the currency area and the entire European Union. In turn, this has fuelled a progressive decline in confidence in the European institutions and iscreating growing questions of interpretation both in terms of economic theoryand institutional asset. This book focuses on these issues and on the degree of legitimacy of the European institutions resulting therefrom. It aims to investigate the nature and validity of the European integration process emphasizing limits and challenges arising from it.

This book offers a critical perspective from which to observe evolution of the Euro Area and the European Union in these times of growing economic and political conflict.

Was the European Central Bank able to assure the relaunch of the European project after the weakening of the post-crisis period? To answer this question, this paper presents an empirical analysis connecting citizen trust in the European Union with a variable intended to be a measure of the monetary policy strategy of the European Central Bank, namely, the interest rate on government bonds extracted from the 1-year maturity yield curve. The dynamic panel technique, applied to nineteen Eurozone countries for the time span of 2004–2018, estimates the presence of a long-run common relationship between the variables despite allowing different short-run adjustment mechanisms. Results are revealed to be not univocal: the easy monetary policy strategy is associated for the whole period with a decline of trust, and therefore, despite its impressiveness, it was not sufficient to relaunch the European Union project. However, when considering the change in strategy of the post-2013 period, it seemed to have contributed to a slight inversion of the decline of trust. These results highlight the importance of non-conventional measures and call for further support from coordinated policy action as a response to the negative shock deriving from the COVID-19 pandemic.

AbstractAlthough not always painless, sound public finance as an objective in the Eurozone generally goes unquestioned. The aim of this article is to investigate the effects of structural adjustment on unemployment in selected Eurozone countries from 2000 to 2013. The estimates suggest that fiscal tightening, especially in declining macroeconomic conditions, will tend to increase the unemployment rate. The results suggest that if the reduction in structural deficit has to be considered an objective to achieve per se, it should be pursued in times of growth.