EU fiscal policy shifts: towards more integration?

Abstract

This article sets out to empirically examine the salience of EU fiscal integration processes between 2007 and 2022. By employing text-mining and qualitative analysis, the previously generated discourse on fiscal integration during and after the financial and sovereign debt crisis, several EU regulatory overhauls, Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis has been tracked. Particularly important have been the new counter-COVID-19 policies such as SURE and NGEU as these substantially impacted the course of common fiscal integration. The assessment covered a body of 160 documents including legal texts, peer reviewed articles, communications and reports of the EU bodies and policy papers, and has relied on the neo(neo)functionalism theory to identify shifts in fiscal integration. The findings show that the discourse on fiscal integration gains prominence with each economic and political crisis and that the shifts can go in the direction of either more (upward) or less (downward) fiscal integration, or involve enough (nil) integration.