The euro rescue fund @5: Taking stock

Jürgen Matthes

No 12/2015e, IW policy papers from Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft (IW) / German Economic Institute

Abstract: On June 7, 2015, the euro rescue fund will celebrate its 5th anniversary. Thus, it is time to take stock regarding the success of the reform strategy, the institutional relevance of the ESM, and current political challenges to the conditionality principle which is an essential pillar of the reformed EMU institutional architecture. First, the rescue and reform strategy of the euro area is on the right track in Ireland, Spain and Portugal. While challenges remain particularly regarding public and private debt levels, all three countries successfully returned to the financial market after implementing a multitude of reforms. The Cologne Institute for Economic Research (IW Köln) analysed the economic progress made since the beginning of the crisis - with the following results: * Ireland performs best, closely followed by Spain and with Portugal coming third. * Economic growth has returned and is particularly buoyant in Ireland and Spain. * Remarkably, domestic demand is also growing relatively rapidly despite the fact that private debt levels are still elevated and deleveraging is ongoing. * Unemployment remains high (particularly in Spain), but is decreasing at a considerable pace. * All three countries have turned their current account from deeply negative into positive digits. This success has been based on a surprisingly strong export performance. [...]

Keywords: European Monetary Union; European Union; Public Debt; Europäische Union; Europäische Währungsunion; Staatsverschuldung (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/110602/1/826752209.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:iwkpps:122015e

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IW policy papers from Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft (IW) / German Economic Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().