Economic Policy panel discussion with Olivier Blanchard and colleagues,
supported by the Federal Ministry of Finance, Germany.

The European Union should abandon the fiscal rules intended to put constraints on national budgetary policies in favour of fiscal standards – qualitative prescriptions that leave room for judgment together with a process to decide whether the standards are met.

That is the central conclusion of a new research report by Olivier Blanchard (Peterson Institute for International Economics), Álvaro Leandro (CaixaBank Research) and Jeromin Zettelmeyer (International Monetary Fund).

Programme

• presentation by Olivier Blanchard (Peterson Institute for International Economics)
• discussion by Davide Debortoli (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Michael McMahon (University of Oxford)
• panellist comments by Beatrice Weder di Mauro (CEPR, The Graduate Institute, Geneva, and INSEAD) and Jakob von Weizsäcker (Federal Ministry of Finance, Germany)
• Q&As

[Read the full paper: Redesigning the EU Fiscal Rules: From Rules to Standards]