Beyond individuals: a more effective structure for the Commission. EPC Commentary, 9 September 2014

In recent days, Brussels has been excited by the circulation of diagrams showing a re-organisation and allocation of posts in the new European Commission, reputedly coming from somewhere within Jean-Claude Juncker’s team. Many have pointed out that some of the appointments seem unlikely, also noting that the diagram seems to miss the Enterprise and Single Market portfolios, where it is difficult to envisage their complete merger into other portfolios, given their size and importance. In addition, not only is the source of the document unknown, it could have been leaked for a specific purpose, for example to test out the reactions in some Member States or to push individual EU countries into action, for example by appointing a woman to get a better portfolio.

Do agricultural subsidies crowd out or stimulate rural credit institutions? The Case of CAP Payments. Factor Markets Working Paper No. 4, September 2011

In this paper we estimate the impact of subsidies from the EU’s common agricultural policy on farm bank loans. According to the theoretical results, if subsidies are paid at the beginning of the growing season they may reduce bank loans, whereas if they are paid at the end of the season they increase bank loans, but these results are conditional on whether farms are credit constrained and on the relative cost of internal and external financing. In the empirical analysis, we use farm-level panel data from the Farm Accountancy Data Network to test the theoretical predictions for the period 1995–2007. We employ fixed-effects and generalised method of moment models to estimate the impact of subsidies on farm loans. The results suggest that subsidies influence farm loans and the effects tend to be non-linear and indirect. The results also indicate that both coupled and decoupled subsidies stimulate long-term loans, but the long-term loans of large farms increase more than those of small farms, owing to decoupled subsidies. Furthermore, the results imply that short-term loans are affected only by decoupled subsidies, and they are altered by decoupled subsidies more for small farms than for large farms; however, when controlling for endogeneity, only the decoupled payments affect loans and the relationship is non-linear.

Xi's Real Test: Delivering on Reform and Maintaining Stability in 2014. Asia Policy Brief 2014/02, February 2014

Emerging signs of economic difficulties have greatly compounded the tasks facing new Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the year of horse. After his government rolled out a surprisingly ambitious blueprint for systemic economic reform in November last year, Xi, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), now finds his agenda complicated by the urgent need to stabilize the overleveraged financial sector while taking the first steps to implement enough of his promised reforms to gain credibility.