The debate that rages around the concept of austerity, specifically in Europe, lacks context. This paper strives to show that successful reforms are 1) pragmatic in their nature, 2) piecemeal in ideology, 3) mandated by supranational institutions that disregard national sovereignty, 4) unattainable prior to the crisis and 5) long-term in their timeframe. Reforms have had beneficial implications above and beyond fiscal austerity. In the case studies of Ireland, Spain and Greece, the reforms instituted are laid out and evaluated. In each case, reforms achieved a different outcome but allow one to see the merits of well-regulated free market capitalism. When reform is appreciated, the legacy of the European and Troika response to the crisis becomes more appropriate.

No / This chapter reviews the substantive issue of the contemporary intertwining of both national and overall EU economy in relation to the spectre of monetary union through first evaluating a country’s readiness for euro entry through a comparison between the convergence criteria stipulated in the Treaty on European Union and the theory of optimal currency areas, which leads to discussion of the economic costs and benefits of euro membership. However, given the unprecedented strain eurozone has now come under the also chapter examines the background to the current eurozone crisis; specifically, how the Global Financial Crisis induced Great Recession triggered the problems within the eurozone. Subsequently, the chapter explores how the advent of EMU has significantly redefined the operation of fiscal and monetary policy with the former retained by member states, but proscribed by EMU-wide rules, whilst the latter has been assumed by a specifically created independent central bank. Hence, the chapter explores the theoretical underpinnings of the operation of monetary and fiscal policy within EMU, where it examines the conduct, coordination and philosophy of macroeconomic policymaking. This analysis is then extended by discussing a series of potential remedies, consisting of an evaluation of EU instigated solutions, together with a series of alternative propositions. However, whilst the economic remedies to the eurozone crisis may eventually succeed, the greater long-term damage may well emerge through the political sphere with the imposition of unelected technocrat governments, together with growing dissatisfaction of mainstream political parties with support for either the far-right, protest parties, anti-euro parties, anti-EU parties, or member states losing confidence in the direction of ‘ever closer union’.

In 2009 the sovereign debt crisis started in the European Union. Every member state was involved in the financial turmoil, in particular Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain. Why were these countries effected more so? Were they still committed to core ideas of the European Union? This paper will review this topic through the perspective of Portugal. Being a former colonial power, once having an authoritative government, and now a full-fledged member of the European Union, Portugal has a unique story to tell about the crisis at hand. This paper will evaluate different European Union principles involving gender equality, tertiary education, politics, and economics while comparing how Portugal ranks in Europeanization to the European Union specifically during the sovereign debt crisis. This paper will conclude by summarizing these topics, analyzing triumphs and setbacks, and hypothesizing Portugal's future in regard to their Europeanization of European Union standards and the current sovereign debt crisis the country faces today.

Cette thèse réalisée au sein du département finance d’HEC Paris est constituée de trois parties. La première s’intéresse à la résilience des chambres de compensation en temps de crise. C’est un travail réalisé avec François Derrien, Evren Örs et David Thesmar dans lequel nous montrons que le manque de régulation de ces acteurs conduit à une détérioration de la confiance qui leur est accordée quand les conditions macroéconomiques se détériorent. Ceci impacte alors négativement leur capacité à assurer une liquidité suffisante sur le marché interbancaire. Le deuxième chapitre porte sur l’impact de la concentration du secteur bancaire autour de quelques grands groupes sur l’allocation macroéconomique du crédit. J’y développe une approche innovante pour répondre à cette question et montre que cet impact est limité: les chocs idiosyncratiques des "big players" n’ont qu’un rôle limité dans la fluctuation du crédit aggrégé. La dernière partie est un travail réalisé avec Adrien Matray et Thomas Bourveau. Nous nous intéressons à la transmission de la culture du risque au sein du secteur bancaire et montrons que les filiales d’un groupe bancaire tendent à converger quant à leur évaluation du risque futur. En retour, cela peut amener à une sous-évaluation de ce dernier et impacter la stabilité financière. / This thesis is divided into three chapters. The first one deals with Central Clearing Counterparties (CCPs) and their resiliency in crisis times. This is a joint work with François Derrien, Evren Ors and David Thesmar. Focusing on CCPs backed repo trades during the eurozone crisis, we show that the market factored in the default of CCPs. In turn, this affected their capacity to ensure liquidity in the interbank market. Our results have strong consequences for the way CCPs should be regulate. The second chapter aims at quantifying the impact of the rise of the concentration in the banking sector on aggregate credit fluctuations. Building on novel empirical approach, I show that big players’ idiosyncratic shocks have a limited impact on aggregate credit. The explanation lies in the fact that the strength of banking groups idiosyncratic shocks is limited compared to aggregate and subsidiaries level ones. The last chapter, a joint work with Thomas Bourveau and Adrien Matray, focuses on the transmission of corporate risk culture. We show that subsidiaries of the same banking group tend to assess future risks in similar ways. In turn, this gives insights on how banking crisis can spread be fueled by corporate risk culture.

This study offers a reinterpretation of the so-called Eurozone crisis, arguing that its crisis character is overstated and that it is rather a normal stage in the process of European banking sector integration. Particularly, I maintain that it is neither a sovereign debt crisis caused by profligate peripheral governments, nor a crisis of the Eurozone's common monetary policy. Nor, however, are the Eurozone's low growth, high unemployment, and economic and political instability deliberate policies, whether by German or Greek governments, European institutions, or the European banking circuitry. Rather, I trace the Eurozone's low growth and high unemployment back to what I call transpositions. Transpositions change the possible boundaries of perceiving political and economic situations by altering the syntagmatic structure governing their intelligibility. The shift from 2003-2007 'boom times' to post-2007 'times of crisis' is one such transposition, which occurs behind the backs of human actors and thus forms the horizon of possible behavior of market and political actors. The Eurozone's 'crisis' transposition, results in differentiations within the asset class of Euro-denominated sovereign debt between a 'core,' comprising Germany, Austria, Latvia, and Finland, among others, and a 'periphery,' encompassing Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus. It follows that the solvency of Eurozone member states is a derivative function of banking sector liquidity, reversing the conventional 'sovereign debt crisis' explanation to what I call the country-fundamental transposition. The second transposition I explore is the austerity transposition. I maintain that the Eurozone's real economy is more interconnected than conventional narratives of European economic unification allow, and that supposedly national European economies – including particularly that of Germany – are integrated subcircuits of Europe's real economy. Constituting them as supposedly national economies is itself a transposition, necessary for the preservation of the European banking circuitry's interconnected balance sheets. Yet, the austerity transposition goes further, beyond a form of political economy oriented towards growth and sustainability, and into a moral economy of condemnation differentiating between morally virtuous and morally pernicious economies in the Eurozone. Its destructive effects are therefore neither irrational nor the result of a German hegemonic agenda, but that of the Eurozone's post-2007 syntagmatic structure. / Ph. D.

This thesis is a comprehensive interpretation of European political history in the periodization from 2008 to 2016. The history begins with an exploration of the intellectual and political origins of the post-World War II project of European integration and the development of, and opposition to, the early institutions that eventually formed the contemporary assemblage of the European Union. Following a traditionally structured history, this work is styled as a ‘history of the present’ that specifies the role of the European Union in precipitating and attempting to overcome the financial and monetary crises, foreign policy quandaries on its Eastern periphery, an unmanageable escalation in migration rates, and the materialization of Eurosceptic, populist, and anti-establishment political actors at European and national levels. The specific arrangement of this thesis intends to fulfill its ultimate purpose of identifying the dynamic circumstances that aided the outcome of the United Kingdom referendum to leave the European Union.

This diploma thesis focuses on changes in the external balance of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain in the period of financial and economic crisis after 2008. The theoretical framework is based on an exact definition of external balance, ultimately as neither surplus nor deficit of a relevant balance in terms of balance of payments. Potential impacts of monetary and fiscal policies on the external balance are described there as well, using the IS-LM-BP model. The second part of the thesis, which employs this theory, is mainly based on an analysis of relevant balances of payments of the aforementioned countries, focusing on their external balance in the period before as well as during the economic crisis. The aim of the analysis is to identify the main causes of external imbalance in the Southern European countries and to find out whether these played a key role as a trigger and accelerator in their recession after 2008. Specific changes during the crisis identified in balances of payments will also be depicted in the IS-LM-BP model. Leading to the conclusion, the outcomes of a correlation analysis are used as well, looking into causal relationships between specific balance of payments variables on the one hand, and macroeconomic variables on the other. A minor part also deals with the role played in this context by the TARGET2 payment system and answers the question to which extent this system took part in the elimination of the external imbalance of the Southern European countries during the crisis.

This dissertation investigates how legal and policy professionals have legally constructed the economic policy and governance of the EU since the beginning of the Eurozone crisis onwards. It follows the legal and policy professionals who received the mandate to enable and consolidate solutions, as well as defend these solutions in court. By tracing the practices and trajectories of these agents, I show how, during an unfolding crisis, economic policy and governance becomes legally constructed and changes the terms of legitimation for EU economic governance. The stakes involved for the professionals involved also change. In this way, the dissertation speaks to the question of how intrusive political power has been legitimated during the Eurozone crisis and what this means for the legitimacy of European governance. Theoretically, this thesis develops a Bourdieusian field approach that is adapted to the transnational and diachronic context of the Eurozone crisis, as it unfolded from the end of 2009 until the adjudication of key high-profile court cases before the Court of Justice of the European Union. Drawing on boundary work, bricolage, and network interactions to analyse the practices of legal and policy professionals, the process of enabling and consolidating solutions is elaborated. Attention is given to how this process engenders stakes for the professionals in this emerging euro-crisis law field, and what this means for emerging legal terms of legitimation for economic governance.Methodologically, field-based and social network analysis are combined in two distinct ways. First, by employing a temporally-focussed network analysis, which caters for change by measuring the shifting centrality of legal and policy professionals over time, I show which professionals have had a high-level of involvement in dealing with crisis issues. This then permits the construction of a referral network based on how these professionals refer to their peers. The involvement of the professionals is further articulated as their accumulated symbolic capital: i.e. their involvement together with being perceived to know well. From this, I infer a species of symbolic capital unique to being part of the Eurozone crisis policy response: juridical capital.This dissertation adds to scholarship on the Eurozone crisis by creating a theoretical framework based on Bourdieusian fields, which utilises a network analytical approach to show how the practices and interactions of legal and policy professionals reconfigure the transnational contexts that are implicated in the crisis policy response. Moreover, it is shown how these professionals’ practices enable solutions that are contested before the Court of Justice of the European Union, putting the Court in a position where it has to bring the definitional power of the law to bear on the actions of EU institutions and the Eurogroup. The Court must decide how responsibility should be attributed. The dissertation shows how legal and policy professionals developed practices, using jurisdictional and constitutionalising logics, and deployed at different times during the crisis, enabled and consolidated processes of legal integration and differentiation. / Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Throughout the Eurozone’s economic crisis, little attention has been given to wage-setting practices. This lack of attention is surprising given that wages have been considered an important instrument for managing the economy in a currency union since the 1960s and have even been emphasized in successive blueprints for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Recent scholarship has found differences in wage-setting practices a key feature distinguishing healthy and crisis-stricken Eurozone countries. Indeed, in this emerging literature, countries that coordinate wages effectively have remained competitive under EMU and had fewer troubles in responding to the crisis, while those with weakly-coordinated wages have struggled mightily. In effect, this literature finds differences in EMU members’ wage-setting regimes at the heart of the economic crisis now facing the Eurozone and the trade imbalances between its Northern and Southern members. However, very little work has examined the specifics of individual labour market models under EMU. Indeed, while this new literature on wage setting and the crisis places wage setting models at its centre, it does not delve into the differences among highly coordinated systems. This oversight is problematic given that scholars of monetary union have suggested that the single currency may amplify the effects of subtle differences in national socioeconomic models, while others have suggested that EMU may be corrosive to some labour market models that coordinate wage setting. This study addresses this gap in the literature, dissecting labour market models by the mechanisms that deliver horizontal and vertical coordination, as well as the indicators to which they are calibrated. Using this framework, it then traces the experiences of Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands under EMU, who use very different mechanisms to coordinate wages. It argues that while EMU has exacerbated longstanding problems in the Belgian wage-bargaining system, it has had little impact upon the German and Dutch systems. Rather, underlying changes in the institutions that manage wage setting in these countries, and changes in social partner organizations – particularly the trade unions – are far more consequential for their continued functioning under EMU. More broadly, these findings suggest that in fact, many designs of highly coordinated wage setting are capable of managing pressures from the single currency. For those Eurozone countries currently refashioning their labour market models, tighter coordination may be just as viable an option as dismantling their wage-bargaining institutions. / Graduate / 0615 / ifdumka@gmail.com

This diploma thesis deals with the topic German-French cooperation on crisis management in the eurozone. Germany and France, represented by chancellor Merkel and president Sarkozy, cooperated together very closely during the crisis and contributed significantly to the further deepening of European economic and monetary union. The aim of this thesis is to analyze and compare the features of the German and French European policy and the German and French ideas about the functioning of economic and monetary union. Secondly, to examine the progress of the German- French cooperation on finding crisis solutions. And finally to define convergence and divergence in the crisis management of both countries. Due to different ideas about economic policy - the German ordoliberalism and French concept called Gouvernance économique - both countries were forced to make mutual concessions. The most important compromises within the anti-crisis measures are the bailouts to indebted countries, European rescue funds or tightening budgetary discipline of European countries by using the fiscal pact. Nevertheless, there are still areas in which both countries disagree, primarily the Eurobonds and other measures to support economic growth. The last part is devoted to the question of German models implementation into the EU and the...