Empirica – Journal of European Economics

Sponsored by the Austrian Economic Association and the Austrian Institute of Economic Research

Empirica publishes empirical and theoretical work on all economic aspects of European Integration. The topics may range from all challenges concerning the deepening of the European Union (Single Market, Lisbon Agenda, EMU) to enlargement and the external relations of the EU (globalisation).

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Geraldine Dany-Knedlik, Martina Kämpfe, Tobias Knedlik
The appropriateness of the macroeconomic imbalance procedure for Central and Eastern European Countries
Empirica, 2021, 48(1), pp.123-139, http://www.springer.com/10663
The European Commission's Scoreboard of Macroeconomic Imbalances is a rare case of a publicly released early warning system. It was published first time in 2012 by the European Commission as a reaction to public debt crises in Europe. So far, the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure takes a one-size-fits-all approach with regard to the identification of thresholds. The experience of Central and Eastern European countries during the global financial crisis and in the resulting public debt crises has been largely different from that of other European countries. This paper looks at the appropriateness of scoreboard of the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure of the European Commission for this group of catching-up countries. It is shown that while some of the indicators of the scoreboard are helpful to predict crises in the region, thresholds are in most cases set too narrow since it largely disregarded the specifics of catching-up economies, in particular higher and more volatile growth rates of various macroeconomic variables.
Research group:Macroeconomics and Public Finance
Language:English

Managing Editor

Univ.-Prof. MMag. Dr. Harald Oberhofer

Function: Senior Economist, Editor-in-Chief Empirica
Research groups: Industrial, Innovation and International Economics