The response speed of the International Monetary Fund. Bruegel Working Paper 2013/03, 16 July 2013

The more severe a financial crisis, the greater has been the likelihood of its management under an IMF-supported programme and the shorter the time from crisis onset to programme initiation. Political links to the United States have increased programme likelihood but have prompted faster response mainly for ‘major’crises. Over time, the IMF’s response has not been robustly faster, but the time sensitivity to the more severe crises and those related to fixed exchange rate regimes did increase from the mid-1980s. Similarly, democracies had tended to stall programme initiation but have become more supportive of financial markets’ demands for quicker action.

The European Union’s Rule of Law Promotion in its Neighbourhood: A Structural Foreign Policy Analysis. EU Diplomacy Paper 04/2013

The promotion of the rule of law has become an important dimension of the European Union’s relations towards its neighbourhood. The rule of law is, however, a complex and multifaceted notion and the EU’s rule of law promotion policy has often been criticised for being either inefficient or self-interested. This collection of short papers offers an analysis of various case studies using the analytical framework of structural foreign policy (SFP) developed by Stephan Keukeleire. It aims to promote an original analytical perspective on the EU’s foreign policy but also to critically test and further develop the SFP analytical framework. The contributions of this collection consist of the shortened version of students’ Master’s theses written at the College of Europe during the academic year 2011-2012 in the framework of the course “The EU as a Foreign Policy Actor” taught by Stephan Keukeleire, Chairholder of the TOTAL Chair of EU Foreign Policy in the Department of EU International Relations and Diplomacy Studies.

Economic Policy Coordination in the Economic and Monetary Union: From Maastricht via the SGP to the Fiscal Pact. CEPS Working Document No. 381, August 2013

This paper first takes a step backwards with an attempt to situate the recent adoption of the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union in the context of discussions on the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and the ‘Maastricht criteria’, as fixed in the Maastricht Treaty for membership in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in a longer perspective of the sharing of competences for macroeconomic policy-making within the EU. It then presents the main features of the new so-called ‘Fiscal Compact’ and its relationship to the SGP and draws some conclusions as regards the importance and relevance of this new step in the process of economic policy coordination. It concludes that the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union does not seem to offer a definitive solution to the problem of finding the appropriate budgetary-monetary policy mix in EMU, which was already well identified in the Delors report in 1989 and regularly emphasised ever since and is now seriously aggravated due to the crisis in the eurozone. Furthermore, implementation of this Treaty may under certain circumstances contribute to an increase in the uncertainties as regards the distribution of the competences between the European Parliament and national parliaments and between the former and the Commission and the Council.