Macroeconomic Policy Coordination In Europe

This book is designed to contribute to this debate on monetary union in Europe by using large scale macroeconomic models of the world economy, including the OECD Interlink model and the widely used NiGEM model, to evaluate the EMU, the EMS and the floating exchange rate policies. Various modelling groups address the issues facing Europe and the implications for policy analysis.

This book studies the international coordination of monetary and fiscal policies in the world economy. It carefully discusses the process of policy competition and the structure of policy cooperation. As to policy competition, the focus is on monetary and fiscal competition between Europe and America. Similarly, as to policy cooperation, the focus is on monetary and fiscal cooperation between Europe and America. The spillover effects of monetary policy are negative while the spillover effects of fiscal policy are positive. The policy targets are price stability and full employment. The policy makers follow either cold-turkey or gradualist strategies. Policy expectations are adaptive or rational. The world economy consists of two, three or more regions. The present book is part of a larger research project on European Monetary Union, see the references at the back of the book. Some parts of this project were presented at the World Congress of the International Economic Association in Lisbon. Other parts were presented at the International Institute of Public Finance, at the Macro Study Group of the German Economic Association, at the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association, at the Gottingen Workshop on International Economics, at the Halle Workshop on Monetary Economics, at the Research Seminar on Macroeconomics in Freiburg, and at the Passau Workshop on International Economics.

A comprehensive study of the international coordination of economic policy in a monetary union. It carefully discusses the process of policy competition and the structure of policy cooperation. As to policy competition, the focus is on competition between the union central bank, the German government, and the French government. Similarly, as to policy cooperation, the focus is on cooperation between the union central bank, the German government, and the French government. The key questions are: Does the process of policy competition lead to full employment and price stability? Can these targets be achieved through policy cooperation? And is policy cooperation superior to policy competition? Another important issue is monetary competition / monetary cooperation between Europe and America.

Essay aus dem Jahr 2010 im Fachbereich Politik - Internationale Politik - Thema: Europäische Union, University of Bath, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: “To become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion” was the main objective at the Lisbon European Council meeting in 2000 (European Commission, 2002). A decade later – in March 2010 – the Commission set a new strategic goal under the name “Europe 2020”. Achieving a “new economic policy coordination process” and again “smart, sustainable and inclusive growth” are the aims of this strategy announced by the Commission in 2010 (European Commission 2010). It becomes obvious that realising these goals requires harmonious coordination of macroeconomic policies. Therefore, this essay explores the different structures and procedures in place to coordinate the macroeconomic policy in the European Union (EU). It will focus upon fiscal and monetary policy-making as well as the Broad Economic Policy Guidelines and the Stability and Growth pact against the background of current debates. Identifying gaps in the policy-making processes will be the emphasis of the first part whereas the second part will be devoted to the exploring whether a form of “Economic Government” exists. This essay argues that the discrepancy between supranational monetary policy-making and national fiscal policy-making is an obstacle to the achievement of “Economic Government”. Due to increasing interdependence in form of institutions such as the Single Market and especially the introduction of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), coordination has become an imperative. In the view of the European Commission (2002), coordination of economic policies is highly desirable in order to “account for direct cross-border spillover effects of national policies on neighbouring countries”. For instance, policy decisions on a national level have an impact on the inflation and exchange rates, which in turn influences the European Central Bank’s (ECB) policy decision-making. Begg et al (2003) categorise arising expenses as social costs, as established fiscal policies become destructive to previously implemented guidelines and harm the stability of the overall coordination. Thus a coherent coordination system reduces social costs. [...]

The European Union and National Macroeconomic Policy examines the way in which the European Union has affected autonomy in the macro-economic policy making of the member states.

The European debt crisis has given new impetus to the debate on economic policy coordination. In economic literature, the need for coordination has long been denied based on the view that fiscal, wage and monetary policy actors should work independently. However, the high and persistent degree of macroeconomic disparity within the EU and the absence of an optimum currency area has led to new calls for examining policy coordination. This book adopts an institutional perspective, exploring the incentives for policymakers that result from coordination mechanisms in the fields of fiscal, monetary and wage policy. Based on the concept of externalities, the work examines cross-border spillovers (e.g. induced by fiscal policy) and cross-policy spillovers (e.g. between fiscal and monetary policies), illuminating how they have empirically changed over time and how they have been addressed by policymakers. Steinbach introduces a useful classification scheme that distinguishes between vertical and horizontal coordination as well as between cross-border and cross-policy coordination. The author discusses farther-reaching forms of fiscal coordination (e.g. debt limits, insolvency proceedings, Eurobonds) with special attention to how principals of state organization affect their viability. Federal states and Bundesstaaten differ in the incentives they offer for debt accumulation – and thus in their suitability for fiscal coordination. Steinbach finds that the originally strict separation between policy areas has undergone significant change during the debt crisis. Indeed, recent efforts to coordinate policy are no longer limited to one policy area, but now extend to several areas. Steinbach argues that further fiscal policy coordination can be effectively deployed to address policy externalities, but that the coordination mechanisms used must match the form of state organization in the first place. Regarding wage policies, there are significant barriers to coordination. Notwithstanding some empirical successes in the implementation of a productivity-oriented wage policy, the high heterogeneity of national wage-setting institutions is likely to prevent any wage coordination.

This volume presents some of the best current research on international economic policy coordination.