Europe has so far been slow to vaccinate its people against the coronavirus, lagging far behind the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. Slowness in the rollout of the vaccination campaign is frustrating. But it might give European countries an opportunity to...
Brueguel
Carbon price floors: an addition to the European Green Deal arsenal
This year will be decisive for Europe’s climate policy, with a wide range of new legislation promised to align current EU climate and energy policies with a new emissions reduction target of 55% by 2030. The reform of the backbone of the EU climate policy...
Will China fall into the middle/high income trap?
This episode is part of the ZhōngHuá Mundus series of The Sound of Economics. ZhōngHuá Mundus is a new newsletter by Bruegel, bringing you monthly analysis of China in the world, as seen from Europe. Sign up now to receive it in your mailbox! The middle-income trap...
Talking about Europe: exploring 70 years of news archives
The authors thank Catarina Midões for her fundamental inputs and suggestions. The authors would like to thank Amandine Crespy, Francois Foret, Michael Leigh, N. Piers Ludlow, Francesco Papadia, Niclas Poitiers, Giuseppe Porcaro, Stefanie Pukallus, André Sapir and...
A K-shaped recovery and the role of fiscal policy
This opinion piece was originally published in the Money Review Section of Kathimerini and is forthcoming in El Economista. The shape of the post-pandemic economic recovery has gone through many letter characterisations, from V to W, to land more or less on the letter...
The impact of COVID-19 on the Internal Market
This study was prepared for the European Parliament’s Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO). The study is available on the European Parliament’s online database, ‘ThinkTank‘. Copyright remains with the European Parliament at all times. This...
How is the G20 tackling debt problems of the poorest countries?
In April 2020, the G20, at the urging of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, launched the Debt Service Standstill Initiative (DSSI) to mitigate the negative financial impact of COVID-19 in the world’s poorest countries at a time when the pandemic’s...
Can central banks save the planet?
Central bankers now seem keen to take on responsibility for policy objectives they have previously shied away from – in particular, tackling climate change. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde acknowledged in January that central bankers will have to...
A brown or a green European Central Bank?
Climate change is a hotly debated issue in the European Central Bank’s ongoing strategy review. While ECB president Christine Lagarde and her colleagues at the centre favour robust tools to tackle climate change, most national central bank governors (like their...
COVID-19 credit-support programmes in Europe’s five largest economies
In 2020, European governments mitigated the economic impact of COVID-19 lockdowns and other pandemic-fighting programmes through a host of initiatives. These included efforts to support credit, such as guarantees for bank loans, particularly to small- and medium-sized...
Central banking’s brave new world
This opinion piece was originally published in Project Syndicate. Twenty years ago, central bankers were proudly narrow-minded and conservative. They made a virtue of caring more about inflation than about the average citizen, and took great pains to be obsessively...
China’s state-owned enterprises and competitive neutrality
As China’s economic weight continues to grow, so does the global impact of its companies. Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) produce a large share of Chinese goods and services. Given their importance both in China and increasingly globally, it should be measured...