Revised August 2020. Global value chains are highly fragmented across countries and dominated by a few large multinational firms. But the challenges of an increasingly difficult international business environment are raising the question of how these patterns will chang...

Less economic integration would make it difficult for the ECB to stabilise the euro area economies. Symmetric monetary policy cannot do anything about this and individual countries would need to use fiscal policy tools.

Background: The current COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is an emergency on a global scale, with huge swathes of the population required to remain indoors for prolonged periods to tackle the virus. In this new context, individuals' health-promoting routines are under great...

Abstract We use an accounting framework to evaluate the aggregate impact of a common lockdown policy for 85 countries. We find that poorer countries devote more labor to essential activities that are unaffected by the lockdown, while richer countries can more easily sub...