Completing the EU’s Economic and Monetary Union: Progress and Plans

This is a preview from the National Institute Economic Review, August 2017, no 241

Ahead of the forthcoming issue of the National Institute Economic Review (NIER no. 241) that will be published on Wednesday 2nd August, we release a series of boxes, each of them looking at specific aspects of economic and social policy.

This Box, prepared by Graham Hacche, NIESR Fellow, outlines challenges and progress of the EU’s Economic and Monetary Union.

"The global financial crisis of 2007–9 and the crisis in the Euro Area in 2011–13 highlighted several shortcomings of EMU. Steps were taken during or in the immediate aftermath of the 2011–13 crisis to improve the coordination of fiscal and other economic policies; to create a safer financial sector, including with the establishment in 2014 of a Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) and Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM) at the ECB, as key pillars of a banking union; and to establish emergency rescue funds, which became the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) in 2012.
However, important gaps remained, and in June 2015 the Five Presidents’ Report (FPR) on Completing Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union set out ‘the principal steps necessary to complete EMU at the latest by 2025’, to be implemented in two stages".