Are Eurozone leaders praying for a Deus ex Machina?

On Wednesday, 22 June 2011, Ulrike Guérot, Senior Research Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and leader of its Germany in Europe Project, addressed the Institute on How Europe Can Get the Germany it Needs, her recent paper co-authored with Mark Leonard.

The European Union's annual budget amounts to almost €130 billion, disbursed on a vast array of programmes ranging from agricultural subsidies to border protection. Each Member State contributes and recieves differing amounts from the EU Budget. This infographic explores each Member States contributions and receipts over the period of 2000-2009.

Major opportunities exist for European agricultural producers and processors over the coming decade.

The European Parliament's Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee conducts quarterly dialogues with the President of the European Central Bank. As part of its preparatory work it commissions briefing papers from some of Europe's leading monetary experts.

Ahead of the next dialogue on 30 June, the latest batch of reports have been posted on the Committee website.

The European University Institute in Florence have compiled an impressive e-book from the proceedings of their April conference on this topic.

Presentations from ECB board members at this Frankfurt conference are now online.

The absence of any common fiscal framework is being felt more severely than anticipated by the Euro’s founders. The current set of asymmetric shocks damaging the eurozone creates a very difficult environment for a common monetary policy.

In this article, Prof. Karl Whelan discusses the pressures on the European Central Bank's interest rate policy and makes the case for a slow and gradual pace of rate increases.

Author: David Marsh

Ahead of his upcoming address at the IIEA, David Marsh, author of The Euro - The Battle for the New Global Currency, has written a guest post for our blog (also available at his OMFIF blog). He argues that the German government and the European Central Bank realise that the big loser from the skirmishing over the euro’s future will be public trust in the European monetary project.

Unpredictable events in Brussels and Athens are likely to have major ramifications in Dublin.

The European Commission has embarked on a flagship initiative, the Innovation Union, aimed at ensuring that EU member states and institutions have in place long-term policies that will foster innovation. The IUS tracks a broad range of innovation indicators including educational standards, R&D expenditure, patent production and business innovation. The goal of the scoreboard is to provide a comparative assessment of the overall performance of each of the EU27 Member States.

Increased uncertainty over France's 2012 election outcome has implications for Europe.