Keep it complex! Prodi's curse and the EU fiscal governance regime complex

The EU fiscal framework has gradually morphed into a regional regime complex through various reforms of the preventive and corrective arms of the Stability and Growth Pact. A regime complex encourages actors to arbitrage between partially overlapping, parallel and nested rules. By drawing on this central insight, this article demonstrates that regime complexity enables member states to respect the letter but not the spirit of the fiscal rules to lower the cost of compliance. It further shows empirically how regime complexity weakens technocratic enforcement capacity when authority is dispersed across multiple levels of governance by focusing on the example of the general escape clauses during the coronavirus pandemic.

EU Governments Must not Return to Their Dysfunctional Fiscal Rules

Fiscal rules such as the European Stability and Growth Pact and the German debt brake have been suspended in the Covid19-pandemic in order to provide emergency measures and to overcome the crisis. Now, the controversial debate is back again: When should governments return to fiscal rules? Should they return to fiscal rules, at all? This article argues that it is not so much a question whether governments should return to fiscal rules at all, but to which kind of rules they should return. Following the deficit bias argument and the need for fiscal policy coordination in a monetary union some kind of limitation for government debt and some kind of fiscal rules may easily be justified. However, that does not mean that governments should return exactly to the previously existing rules, because these are economically flawed. Recently the argument for reform has become even stronger due to new empirical evidence about the macroeconomic effectivity of fiscal policy, the experience of the dysfunctionality of the existing rules during the Euro crisis and the fact that the cost of public debt has been reduced dramatically because of persistently low if not negative nominal interest rates. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston 2021.

Dispelling the shadow of fiscal dominance? Fiscal and monetary announcement effects for euro area sovereign spreads in the corona pandemic.

We use event study regressions to compare the impact of monetary versus fiscal policy announcements on euro area government bond spreads in the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout our specifications and robustness checks, we detect larger effects for monetary than for fiscal announcements. Among monetary policy instruments, the PEPP has the largest spread compressing effects. Comparing the announcement effects for fiscal crisis tools, Next Generation EU shows significant results in contrast to news on pure loan instruments. The relaxation of European fiscal rules through the activation of the emergency-escape clause under the Stability and Growth Pact is associated with rising spreads. We conclude that the stability of euro area bond markets in the presence of a severe solvency shock depends to a large extent on the Eurosystem's unconstrained sovereign bond purchases. Our results suggest that fiscal support can play a stabilizing role if it includes, like Next Generation EU, a significant transfer component.