Economic Governance & Fiscal Policy

For many years, economic governance and fiscal policy in the EU have been determined by major reforms in the wake of the euro area crisis. Sovereign bailout funding and the banking union were the most important of these reforms. But they were obviously not sufficient as the Covid-19 pandemic saw more reforms in both respects. The New Generation EU package can be seen both as a pre-emptive strike to avoid sovereign bailouts and as a substitute for private finance to overcome the credit crunch for small and medium businesses. This section would like to attract papers that either discuss current policy changes in this domain or those that focus on the longer-term institutional trajectory of economic governance and fiscal policy in the EU and the euro area (or both). Why is economic-fiscal governance a permanent construction site? How predictable or path-breaking have the recent reforms been: do they indicate a paradigm change from an emphasis on discipline to risk pooling and macro-cohesion policy? Have they changed budgetary politics in member states or do they merely allow austerity to be postponed? How deep have the political divisions between Northern and Southern Europe over economic governance and fiscal policy proven to be? What role did important institutional players (such as the Commission, the European Central Bank, the European Parliament, the Council, or the European Council) play in the consolidation and in the new round of reforms? The section is open to a plurality of methods and approaches. It welcomes both mono-disciplinary and interdisciplinary contributions.