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NGEU is a powerful anti-cyclical policy, but there are many doubts about its potential scope and long-term legacy. If high-quality programmes are chosen, effectively developed and accompanied by useful reforms (the conditions attached to the disbursements could play an important role), a very high impact and potentially even permanent benefits could be achieved. If not, the boost to growth will be only fleeting.

Although significant progress has been made in recent years in disconnecting from Russian energy supplies, major challenges remain in order for Europe to have a sustainable, secure and competitive energy system.

We continue to analyse the phenomenon of de-risking among the major economic powers in a new instalment of articles dedicated to international trade and geopolitics. In this first article, we will focus on the United States and China, and in a second edition, on the European Union.

Having laid out the complex trade relationship between the United States and China, we continue to analyse the phenomenon of de-risking among the major economic powers, focusing on the European Union.

We examine NATO’s reasons and objectives of increasing defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, and to what extent it is reasonable to expect the European Union to increase it. 

The ECB has completed a monetary cycle, leaving the negative rates and unconventional measures of the last decade behind and significantly tightening monetary policy. During this cycle, the ECB has also adjusted the structure it uses to guide and implement monetary policy

Macro fundamentals have closely aligned with observed sovereign risk premiums in recent years. In fact, the sustained moderation of the main euro area risk premiums clearly aligns with what is predicted by the fundamentals. However, a country‑by‑country analysis reveals a more nuanced picture.

The debate over working hours has intensified significantly in Spain, on the one hand, due to proposals for its reduction, and on the other, due to the rise in hours lost due to temporary sick leave. Beyond the impact on business costs and the labour market, the implications for labour productivity are of particular interest, with widely divergent readings since the pandemic in the case of Spain depending on whether we measure it per hour worked or per employee. This article places these debates within the broader the European context, drawing similarities and differences with other countries in our vicinity.

Has the COVID-19 affected the consumption habits of each generation or the same types of goods in equal measure? How did we consume before and during the pandemic?

The COVID-19 crisis has triggered a change in consumption habits in our society and has intensified the use of e-commerce. In this article, we analyse whether this intensification has been uniform across all age groups and constant throughout all phases of the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a historic fall in household consumption in 2020. In the euro area, the decline reached 15.4% in Q2 of that year and stood at –8.1% for the year as a whole, with bigger reductions in the countries hardest hit by the first wave of the pandemic. Unlike previous crises, however, the declines in consumption were not accompanied by similar declines in households’ disposable income.

In recent quarters, the global economy has shown remarkable resilience and we estimate that it could have grown by around 3.0% in 2023. With this starting point, we explain the latest revision to our global economic forecast scenario and the outlook for monetary policy.