PARIS – Controversy is essential to the advancement of science. So the debunking of methodological flaws and a coding error in a paper by th…

BRUSSELS – It is an old and never-ending contest. On one side are the moral-hazard scolds, claiming that one of the major responsibilities c…

BRUSSELS – The European Commission’s latest economic outlook paints a disheartening picture: unemployment rates close to or above 5% in Aust…

BRUSSELS – Financial crises tend to start abruptly and end by surprise. Three years ago, the euro crisis began when Greece became a cause fo…

BRUSSELS – Forget the fiscal cliff. The real issue is the fiscal mountain. According to the International Monetary Fund, the challenge of re…

BRUSSELS – Paul Krugman, the Princeton University economist and blogger, recently summarized diverging transatlantic trends as follows: “Bet…

BRUSSELS – Is it time for fiscal consolidation or stimulus? Should governments cut or increase spending? Once again the issue is a matter of…

FRANKFURT – It looks like a coordinated offensive: on September 6, the European Central Bank outlined a new bond-buying program, letting mar…

BRUSSELS – August was quieter than feared on the European bond markets. So, while resting on Europe’s beaches and mountains, policymakers co…

BRUSSELS – Whenever a society regards its problems solely through the prism of distributional disputes, its chances of solving them diminish…

BRUSSELS – Europe’s leaders will meet again at the end of June. The question they must answer this time is not whether they can rescue this …

BRUSSELS – When the architects of the euro started drawing up plans for its creation in the late 1980’s, economists warned them that a viabl…

BRUSSELS – In 2005, France and the Netherlands both voted no to a constitutional treaty for the European Union, derailing years of integrati…

BRUSSELS – A new controversy has emerged between the European Union and several of its main trade partners since the EU decided to include i…

BRUSSELS – The blame game in Europe has not yet begun. An agreement between Greece and its private creditors and public lenders will enable …

BRUSSELS – For the third year in a row, the eurozone is the weakest link in the world economy. In 2010, attention was focused on responses t…

BRUSSELS – In June, it was Greece. In August, it was France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. In September, it was Greece again – and Spain. In N…

BRUSSELS – A series of developments over the last few weeks have set in motion a downward spiral for the eurozone. Unless officials – e…

BRUSSELS – Since the summer, the continuing installments of the Greek crisis have concealed a worrying process of fragmentation in the euroz…

BRUSSELS – France, which now holds the presidency of the G-20, has chosen reform of the international monetary system as its main priority f…

BRUSSELS – The world was expecting Eurobonds to come out of last week’s Franco-German summit; instead, the eurozone will get economic govern…

BRUSSELS – You can always trust the Americans, Winston Churchill said, because in the end they will do the right thing, after they have exha…

BRUSSELS – For months now, a fight over sovereign-debt restructuring has been raging between those who insist that Greece must continue to h…

BRUSSELS – The threat last month of a downgrade of the United States’ federal debt by the rating agency Standard and Poor’s was in a way mer…

BRUSSELS – For a year, European policymakers have been busy fixing bugs in the design of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). As with defectiv…