I had been awarded a European Commission FP7 grant for a collaborative project entitled: Macro Risk Assessment and Stabilization Policies with New Early Warning Signals (RASTANEWS). The project focused on research about the future of macro-economic and monetary integration in Europe. My contribution was aimed at the application of time series analysis for modelling financial and macroeconomic (in)stability.
RASTANEWS intended to enhance knowledge base, at both theoretical and an applied level, on many aspects of the future of macro-economic and monetary integration in Europe thus paving the way to a revised governance of the EMU, and the EU as a whole, in the wake of the debt crisis. To facilitate the timely identification of macro risks, the project proposed a new system of early warning indicators, to be implemented within the EMU surveillance mechanism. This proposal was consistent with our theoretical framework and was based on an empirical macro-finance approach.
Twelve European universities worked together on this project. RASTANEWS received the highest rating out of more than 100 grant applications. The grant was € 2.4M in total, with approximately €88K coming to Brunel.
For the webpage of the RASTANEWS click the link: RASTANEWS
Partners
The RAstaNEWS Consortium brought together 12 European universities and think tanks.
They are:
Università degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca
(Project Coordinator)
Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale
(researc unit: European Programme)
Fondation National des Sciences Politiques
(research unit: OFCE)
(research unit: CENDEF)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Polski Instytut Spraw Międzynarowych
Ruprechts-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
(research unit: Alfred-Weber-Institute)
Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London
One representative for each partner participated to the Consortium’s Steering Committee (SC) meetings.
1st RAstaNEWS Conference, 2014:
On January 14th, ISPI hosted the First RAstaNEWS Conference.
“More Europe: Letting the Euro Work at Full Speed” was attended, among other distinguished speakers, by the Italian Minister of Economy and Finances, Fabrizio Saccomanni, and by the Vice President of the European Central Bank, Vítor Constâncio. Chair of the Conference was Tony Barber, Europe editor at the Financial Times.
Main topic of the Conference was the acknowledgment of the fragility of the common currency construction – finally exposed during the European debt crisis -, both from an economic and a political point of view. The speakers at the Conference discussed the state of the European recovery, and the political steps that have been taken in order to address the original drawbacks of the institutional framework of the common currency (e.g., the ESM, the permanent bailout fund; the SSM and SRM, different elements of the nascent banking union) and new proposals to let the euro achieve its full potential (e.g., elements of a fiscal capacity for the EU).
Before the Conference:
Vítor Constâncio talked about the main measures adopted by the ECB in the face of the crisis; Rolf Strauch, responsible for Economics and Policy Strategy at the ESM, listed factors that let Spain succesfully exit its financial assistance programme; Lucio Pench, Director of Fiscal Policy at the DG ECFIN, told us about the EU Commission role to cope with austerity measures and macroeconomic divergence.
Following is the list of members of the RAstaNEWS Steering Committee:
Christian Conrad (Ruprechts-Karls-Universität Heidelberg)
Domenico Delli Gatti (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)
Mauro Gallegati (Università Politecnica delle Marche)
Zoltán Gál (University of Pécs)
Cars Hommes (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Menelaos Karanasos (Brunel University London)
Claudio Morana (Università di Milano Bicocca)
Pablo Rovira-Kaltwasser (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
Francesco Saraceno (Fondation National des Sciences Politiques)
Patrizio Tirelli (Università degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca)
Pawel Tokarski [Polski Instytut Spraw Miedzynarodowych (at the time)]
Antonio Villafranca (Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale)
First RAstaNEWS Report (20-06-2015)
RAstaNEWS issued its first Annual Report!
The report takes off from the assumption that rethinking the future of macroeconomic and monetary integration in Europe requires a substantial revision and integration of underlying macroeconomic models, and a new vision about what markets and policymakers can accomplish. In a nutshell, since its inception RAstaNEWS has aimed at providing two different but interrelated policy outputs to EU and Eurozone policymakers:
1) a proposal to reform EMU policies in a way that would contribute to decrease the likelihood of the occurrence of future crises, while at the same time supporting overall growth in the currency union; 2) a proposal to pinpoint or devise new early warning signals (EWS), in order to spot problematic disequilibria at the macro level, with the aim to act as early as possible to rebalance national economies or the Eurozone as a whole before a full-fledged crisis ensues.
In this Annual report, we focused on the former proposal. A second Annual report was then aimed at contributing to the EWS literature.
