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Unpaid work carried out inside the home has increased in the pandemic, and evidence points to women’s share in care responsibilities and domestic tasks remaining higher than those of men in the pandemic, continuing the gender divides of past decades.

The Digital Age saw the rise of several rapidly growing digital platforms with substantial market shares, and this development is expected to continue. Europe is a large target market for these globally operating platforms, although the majority of the most successful platforms come from the USA and Asia and will likely continue to do so in the future. This article reveals the reasons for the success of digital platforms and discusses the recent European Commission proposal for a Digital Markets Act based on the analysis of the status quo.

Cutbacks in government spending slowed the recovery and led to lasting damage to workers and economic growth.

Too much blood in terms of unemployment and sweat in terms of intellectual effort has been spent on trying to determine the amount of fiscal space that economies have — our policy focus instead should be on what to do with the fiscal space that almost all advanced economies (and a surprising number of emerging market economies) actually have.

Along with the Green Deal, the von der Leyen Commission immediately started to look at how to adopt an industrial strategy that would promote EU competitiveness and support the Commission’s self-assigned “geopolitical” role by boosting strategic autonomy.

EU trade policy, which is essential to a prosperous European economy and industry, has an important role to play in tackling the major challenges of our times relating to worsening geo-economic and trade tensions, enduring global sustainability issues and a deteriorating multilateral order.

In the face of mounting evidence of global warming, which is an irreversible process, central banks, as other policymakers, have to play their part. They need to consider climate risks not only in their internal management, but also when they devise their strategies, conduct their policies and implement their decisions. This article examines the possible impacts of climate risks on the two main variables of interest for monetary policy, economic growth and inflationary pressures. On that basis, it infers the potential consequences for the objective of monetary policy, its conduct and its implementation.

This paper analyses how China’s investments in Germany have developed over time and the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in this regard, based on four different datasets, including our own survey in mid-2020. Our analysis shows that Germany is currently one of the most attractive investment destinations for Chinese investors. Chinese state-owned enterprises have played an important role as investors in Germany — particularly in large-scale projects. The COVID-19 pandemic has had some negative but rather temporary effects on Chinese investments in Germany. Germany is expected to stay attractive to Chinese investors who seek to gain access to advanced technologies and know-how in the future.

The pandemic exposes policymakers to fundamental uncertainties about future economic scenarios. While policymakers have to act forcefully to mitigate the impact on the economy, these conditions call for policy strategies that are also robust to uncertainty. This article compares two concepts of robust strategies: robust control and robust satisficing. It argues that a robust satisficing strategy is preferred and shows that the crisis responses of governments and central banks in Europe share features of robust satisficing in several dimensions.

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement creates the world’s largest free trade zone. The agreement has the potential to increase trade relations among its members and further promote the development of regional value chains in “Factory Asia”. This article presents the topics included in the recently concluded agreement, details the existing economic linkages between its members and discusses the expected consequences for its member states and third countries.

As the COVID-19 pandemic causes a record number of people to work from home, this disruptive event will likely have a long-lasting impact on work arrangements. Given existing research on the effects of working from home on hours worked and wages, an increased availability of working from home may provide a chance for women to catch up with their male counterparts. Yet, the need to simultaneously care for children during the COVID-19 lockdown may also revive traditional gender roles, potentially counteracting such gains. We discuss the likely effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender gaps in the labour market and at home in light of recent empirical findings and novel statistics on the heterogeneous structure of work arrangements among couples. We construct a novel teleworkability index that differentiates between fully teleworkable, partly teleworkable and on-site jobs and find that in about a third of households the COVID-19 shock is likely to induce shifts in the intra-household allocation of tasks from mothers to fathers.

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has a severe impact on societies, economies and labour markets. However, not all countries, socio-economic groups and sectors are equally affected. Part of this disparity can be related to the different role and extent of short-time work, which is now being used more widely than during the Great Recession. Furthermore, unemployment benefits have been made more generous in many countries. While it is still too early to assess the relative success of national strategies to cope with the pandemic and to revitalise the labour market as well as to evaluate the medium-term fiscal viability of different support measures, a few policy directions become apparent. These include the use of digital tools to increase resilience against economic shocks, the longer-term perspective of short-time workers in the current crisis, social protection for self-employed workers that is robust to economic crises and resilient models for school-to-work transitions of younger workers.

Political polarization, meaning sharp differences in the political ideologies and preferences of the partisans of different parties, implies that members of one party are more likely to dismiss the policies and recommendations of spokesmen and appointees of the other party on the grounds that those policies and recommendations are informed by value systems inimical to their own. In the US, this means that when spokesmen for one party endorse masks, members of the other party reject them instinctively and automatically.

With the world on the brink of yet another steep recession, and with ecological disaster looming, we can no longer afford the luxury of an economic policy which concentrates on the fight against inflation, leaves unemployment to emergency measures, distribution of wealth and income to the market, and ignores ecological challenges.

Governments, regulatory authorities and standard-setting bodies started acting on global stablecoins triggered by the Libra announcement. Among the concerns expressed by the G7 and the G20 are risks to the stability of the financial system. The Financial Stability Board and the Financial Action Task Force have worked on regulatory issues and anti-money laundering ahead of the G20 summit in November 2020. Overall the Libra project has raised many questions on the regulatory front. Facebook had to revise the concept as Libra 2.0 and resubmit it for approval in April 2020. The European Commission announced a new regulation on Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) including stablecoins in September 2020 as part of a new Digital Finance Package. This opens the next chapter in a regulatory cat and mouse game.

The coronavirus pandemic led to substantial revisions of 2020 GDP growth projections. We analyse whether and to what extent the quality of government policies in handling the health aspects of the crisis influence cross-country differences in the economic impact of the pandemic as projected by the OECD, the IMF and the World Bank. We measure policy quality by a recently published Economist Intelligence Unit index and a COVID-19 Misery index combining the stringency of government-imposed distancing measures with the COVID-19 fatality rate. Moreover, we control for international spillovers captured by trade openness and export exposure to tourism. Results for most specifications show that good government performance pays off as the respective countries record less severe revisions of growth forecasts. Only in a few cases, our findings suggest that the pandemic’s global effect might be so strong that actions by individual governments do not affect cross-country differences of growth revisions. Finally, there is broad evidence supporting the view that a country’s exposure to the global economy influences its growth outlook relative to other countries.

This paper highlights some peculiar characteristics of the economic crisis induced by the spread of COVID-19. It suggests two intertwined policy measures in order to tackle the emergency phase of the crisis and to support the economy in the subsequent recovery phase. The proposed short-term policy measures offer policy responses in the event of a second wave of coronavirus infections in the coming months. In the aftermath of the emergency phase, the current proposal puts forward the implementation of a massive EU-wide recovery plan addressing the long-lasting technological and environmental challenges of these years, which will be financed by European institutions through the issuance of European Pandemic Recovery Bonds.

The growing inequality of market income has attracted considerable attention; less so the redistribution of income. This article analyses key trends and drivers of income redistribution in the EU and the world. It shows that in the EU increasing redistribution has largely stabilised the dispersion of disposable income since the late 1990s. Only some advanced countries with a dominant free market ideology have recorded an increasing inequality of disposable income alongside a growing inequality of market outcomes. The evidence from panel data shows that the degree of redistribution increases with per capita income and with the share of low-tech, low-income sectors in manufacturing as well as, in line with the median voter model, when more than half of the voters earn less than the average income in countries with a majoritarian electoral system. More redistribution is associated with lower budgetary surpluses or higher deficits.

This asymmetric effect of the shock on economic activities becomes an asymmetric impact on countries depending on their sectoral composition.

The success of support measures as COVID-19 lockdowns are relaxed depends on the type of recovery the EU wants to achieve.

Although austerity was particularly strong in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2008 and its consequences in the euro area, Italian fiscal policies have been characterised by tough consolidation periods ever since the 1990s.

The COVID-19 pandemic carries heavy threats, and preserving stable and coordinated international trade relations will be essential to avoid catastrophic disorders or conflicts.

The premise of this paper is that state aid to distressed companies should benefit not only the current owners but also the employees, who are the ones taking personal risks to continue or restart companies. Government aid during the Great Recession was aimed primarily at restoring the status quo. In the current deeper crisis, aid should be designed to create a fairer, more inclusive and more socially responsible economy by promoting employee ownership as both an incentive and a reward. We show how the Employee Stock Ownership Plan, which has been pioneered in the US for 40 years and can be adapted to the European legal context, can be used as the vehicle for structuring this aid.

To what extent a pension system can be judged fair given structural differences in life expectancy across socioeconomic groups is not straightforward and will depend on the exact design of the system and other social policies in place, and how these policies interact with the pension system.

Many countries followed the German example in increasing the legal retirement age, reaching the German standard envisaged for 2030 (of 67 years of age) at an earlier stage (in Ireland: 2021; the Netherlands: 2021; and Denmark: 2022) or even exceeding it (in Ireland: with 68 years, starting in 2028).

A specificity of the current French system is that a private sector worker is currently covered by two mandatory public pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) schemes: a general defined benefit (DB) scheme — which is the main component — managed by the state and a points scheme (AgircArrco) managed by social partners, together representing about 70% of paid benefits.

Italy, which is sometimes considered a laggard in terms of social and economic reforms, can boast a pension system that is, by and large, functioning sufficiently well in terms of ensuring an adequate purchasing power to retirees and a financially sustainable outlook in the long term, even when taking into account adverse demographic developments.

The economic agenda of bringing jobs back and improving dynamics can sometimes work in the short run, if past fiscal prudence has left some space for higher government expenditures for low incomes. However, in the long run, protection and redistribution without active components, innovation and new firms do not work.

The UK’s defining domestic economic policy under the Conservative governments since 2010 can be subsumed under the term ‘austerity’.

The new transatlantic partnership can be the cornerstone of this change: real climate protection without false truths and hidden smoke bombs, but a shift to a full supply of renewable energies.

The low-carbon transition, for example in line with the European Commission's proposed Long-Term Strategy1 net-zero2 target by 2050 or the Commission President-elect 'climate neutrality' objective, will require a very large increase in electricity, especially for low-carbon solutions in mobility, heating and cooling and the decarbonisation of energy-intensive industries

The trade dispute between the US and China has reached a point where export restrictions on rare earths have become a possible means for sanction. This contribution provides a succinct analysis of the current dependency of the US on rare earths from China and draws parallels to the events during the rare earth crisis of 2010 and 2011, which was caused by geopolitical tensions between Japan and China. Respective risks associated with restrictions on the trade of rare earths are considered. Findings suggest that Europe could be affected as well and should be better prepared to mitigate supply disruptions in rare earth trade. Potential mitigation strategies and consequences of the current developments for Europe are also discussed.

After an initial take-off during the first eight years following unification, the Eastern German economy started to stall and regress to its old growth path of the 1950s and 1960s. The initial quick convergence only compensated for the dismal stagnation that the expropriation and concentration strategies of party leader and general secretary Erich Honecker had produced. Since then, Eastern Germany has followed a two-thirds growth path compared to Western Germany, which shows that the structural problems of communist rule have not been overcome. The share of small and medium-sized firms is too small, creating an extremely fragmented group structure of firms and, thus, a lack of internationally active headquarters. A 1% increase of small and medium-sized firms on average reduces growth by 0.3%. This paper argues that catching up with the West will take more than a generation and needs to address central economic woes by encouraging endogenous, as well as exogenous growth through a merger-and-acquisition strategy and through the establishment of headquarters.

With the spectre of a recession looming in the eurozone (and elsewhere), the policy question arises as to how much leeway do the fiscal authorities in the eurozone have to follow counter-cyclical fiscal policies aimed at providing some stimulus to the economy.

By introducing wealth preference to a dynamic macroeconomic model, instead of those market distortions, we can deal with the secular deficiency of aggregate demand and a discrepancy between fl ow and stock variables.

With interest rates at zero where they are expected to remain for a long time, and with the main risk being that inflation is too low, fiscal policy must be active and contribute to cyclical stabilisation

The European Commission methodology for computing the cyclically adjusted government budget balance provides a robust measurement of the fiscal position of the Member States. The fiscal semi-elasticities at the core of this method are structural parameters, mostly of fiscal nature, not linked to cyclical or other economic factors. Fiscal semi-elasticities also exhibit an emulation effect between neighbours and some groupings of countries.

Distinguishing between two different schools of thought that are named after two different universities, Harvard and Berkeley, the article looks at the evolution, past and future, of the international monetary system. While the empirical view holds that the system will remain unipolar and dollar-based, the opposing view uses history to contend that it may potenially evolve away from the dollar into a multipolar system.

The Italian sovereign bond market experienced considerable disruption in May 2018 and subsequent months amid concerns about the fi scal implications of political developments in Italy. This episode is used to examine relationships among the euro area bond markets some six years after the euro area sovereign bond market crisis of 2009–2012. The main fi nding is that turbulence in a periphery Member State's bond market (in this case, Italy's) continues to have its strongest cross-border effects on other periphery countries' markets, while core Member States react by disengaging from the sovereign bond market where the disruption originates. The core-periphery distinction identifi ed among the 11 euro area Member States during the crisis then remains broadly intact. The implication for policy is that adverse country shocks continue to have asymmetrical effects within the euro area sovereign bond market. An emphasis on the sustainability of national public fi nances remains necessary, both to protect individual sovereigns against adverse market developments and to reduce the spillover of such shocks to other Member States.

Data governance is currently dominated by the hegemonicmodel in which the data collector retains exclusive controlover the data it collects. The overreach of this model has created problems in various fields that call for alternativedata governance models

Cooperative compliance represents a shift in thinking for tax administrations, away from a deterrence approach where taxpayers are coerced to comply with tax rules and threatened by audits and penalties, toward a more responsive and collaborative approach.