RESPONSIBLE ADMINISTRATOR

Legislative proposals on EU economic governance: what is missing within and beyond? NOTE This briefing paper will delineate two important additions to the draft by the commission. First, the idea of macroeconomic surveillance is a very good and necessary one, since we have seen that macroeconomic imbalances have contributed to the propagation of the financial crisis in Europe. Second, the enforcement of the SGP has clearly been lacking during the EU sovereign debt crisis earlier this year. Therefore, I propose a method of implementing sanctions that constitutes a stronger commitment technology than the current one, and resembles the structure of monetary policy making in EMU. By assessing only a few of the possible indicators, we have already seen that the macroeconomic imbalances were no new phenomenon at the end of 2009. In fact, they have been at play since the start of EMU. This warrants a much larger role for these (and other) indicators to assess the divergences in the Euro area. Furthermore, as many observers have also noted, these divergences have been allowed to grow due to the weak enforcement of the SGP. Consequently, I propose also a Fiscal Experts Panel (FEP) that will provide advice on fiscal policy matters to the European Parliament. Its members have to be “unelected experts appointed for a fixed duration, long enough to make them fully independent and to exceed the horizon of the policy target. ” In addition, they have to have a considerable reputation to give their policy advice enough weight; we can think of i.e. a panel analogous to the Monetary Experts Panel, consisting of those experts knowledgeable on fiscal policy. The FEP will have responsibilities regarding both fiscal imbalances, and will advise on steps that have to be taken once imbalances have been detected