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Do crises bring us closer together? Many have observed how, during the Covid-19 pandemic, several European societies experienced a 'rally around the flag' effect. While this certainly took the form of support for incumbent governments, anecdotal evidence suggests that individuals' European identification may have been affected as well. In this paper, we exploit the unique timing and panel nature of a survey, whose respondents were interviewed in March/beginning of April 2020, again in July 2020, and finally in November 2022 to analyze whether a change in attachment to Europe occurred between the first and the second wave of the pandemic and with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our results show that the emotive dimension of EU attachment changed over the course of these crises, increasing both during the Covid pandemic and after the invasion of Ukraine. Our results support the view that symmetric crises tend to bring people closer together, suggesting that far-reaching EU-level actions in case of crises create, rather than require, a perception of belonging to an EU-level community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not only the states of the European Union (EU) that are heterogeneous in many respects, but also the regions existing within them. In this paper, we make use of a conjoint experiment on a particular type of technocratic solidarity – joint procurement of medical countermeasures (JPMC) – to explore how old and new regional-level heterogeneities affect public support for such type of solidarity. To this end, we exploit an experimental dataset, covering five EU countries at different phases of the Covid-19 pandemic in spring 2020. Our experimental results show that a broad policy scope, allocation based on need and EU governance all raise support for JPMC. Moreover, economically weaker regions and areas more severely hit by the pandemic exhibit stronger public backing for JPMC. Turning to the link between regional heterogeneities and specific design features of JPMC, evidence suggests that wealthier regions display greater public backing for a broader scope of the policy. Thus, our results suggest that public preferences for technocratic solidarity are generally strong, but also depend to some extent on regional collective rationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution, based on the proposals by Bakker, Beetsma, and Buti (2024a. "The Case for a European Public-Goods Fund." Project Syndicate, 4 March. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/public-goods-fund-could-finance-green-transition-and-ensure-fiscal-responsibility-by-age-bakker-et-al-2024-03, 2024b. "Two Birds with One Stone: Investing in European Public Goods while Maintaining Fiscal Discipline at Home." Intereconomics 59 (2): 1–6), discusses an EU fund to finance investments with positive cross-border spill-overs, such as large infrastructures, that are too expensive for individual countries to finance, or of which the benefits are insufficiently internalised by individual investing countries. Each country receives a given part ("envelope") of the fund. The envelope size and the contribution as well as the eventual debt repayment burden could be proportional to the size of the economy, thereby minimising cross-border redistribution. Access to the fund's resources is conditional on adherence to the EU's new fiscal rulebook. If a country fails to make full use of its envelope, the remaining resources are re-allocated over the other envelopes. Hence, the fund provides an incentive for countries to simultaneously undertake investments that benefit groups of countries or the EU at large, and to maintain fiscal discipline. We discuss the size of the fund, how it fits within the EU current instrument set, its governance, its financing and its potential political appeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Putting the high public debt ratios on a downward path after the surge during the pandemic and allocating sufficient resources to deliver on the green and digital transition will be among the priorities confronting the EU institutions emerging from the June 2024 European elections. After a long and painful debate, EU institutions have agreed upon a new fiscal rulebook that aims to incentivise the reallocation of national public spending to the green and digital transition. However, the additional public investment is unlikely to suffice to comply with the goals of net zero that the EU has set for itself. In particular, investments of a transnational nature will remain undersupplied. This article proposes setting up a successor to NextGenerationEU – a new EU fund until 2030 for financing European public goods (EPGs) to address the double transition. Access to the facility would be conditional on adherence to the EU fiscal rules. By tying up the implementation of the new fiscal framework, the debate on the future of NextGenerationEU and the next multiannual EU budget post-2027, the credibility and internal consistency of these various instruments will be greatly enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]