The future of the European Economic and Monetary Union: European monetary and fiscal policies

Abstract

NOeG 2015, the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association, took place in Klagenfurt, June 5–6, 2015. It was organized by the Department of Economics, Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt. The main theme of the conference was ‘‘The Future of the European Economic and Monetary Union—European Monetary and Fiscal Policies’’. 55 papers dealing with macroeconomic policies in the European Union, especially the Euro Area, as well as other fields of economics were presented and discussed. Among the highlights were invited plenary papers by Mike Wickens (University of York), Seppo Honkapohja (Bank of Finland) and Ansgar Belke (University of Duisburg-Essen); and a plenary discussion on ‘‘The Future of the Euro’’ with Ansgar Belke, Peter Gauper (Raiffeisen Landesbank Karnten), Thomas Gehrig (University of Vienna), Ewald Nowotny (Oesterreichische Nationalbank) and Willi Semmler (New School for Social Research, New York) as invited speakers. The present special issue of Empirica—Journal of European Economics contains the invited papers and a selection of papers from the conference devoted to the main topic of the conference. They were selected from a larger number of submissions following the usual refereeing process of the journal. At the time of the conference, economic policy makers in the Euro Area were fully occupied with the ‘‘Greek tragedy’’ of exploding sovereign debt amidst a deep recession with record unemployment and negative growth. Several contributions to the conference and to this issue deal with that crisis, which not only affected Greece but the entire Euro Area. Although in the meantime the Greek crisis was mitigated, it cannot be regarded as having been solved. The crisis has several aspects,