Tag: IMF

  • A Not-So-Surprising Accession

    On January 1st, 2014, the day on which the euro had its 15th birthday, Latvia became the 18th member of the eurozone. This accession was prepared over many years and Lithuania is scheduled to follow in 2015, but still this will have come as a surprise to many. Given the predicaments to which eurozone members,…

  • Frau Merkel and the ‘C-Word’

    Both the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have just published findings about the performance of the German economy and the state of structural reforms. While there is plenty of discussions in Berlin about what ‘the others’ (in particular France) are not getting right, there is not much of a debate on what…

  • Euro crisis: a View from Lisbon

    In my first contribution to this blog, I would like to start with outlining what I’ll set out to do in the coming months. The readers of this blog will be quite familiar with the ‘orthodox’ account of the current crisis in the eurozone: profligate public spending by governments in the European periphery, which need…