Since 2008-09, the European Union (EU) experienced two major economic crises revealing all the flaws of the existing model of economic governance. By leaving the majority of the countries with high levels of deficit and public debt, the two crises have shown that the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is indeed an unfinished project where the monetary union alone is not sufficient to safeguard the entire EU economy. To strengthen the EMU and to mitigate future risks that could possibly lead to the collapse of the euro-area, many called for a deeper fiscal integration by creating a central fiscal capacity for the EMU or, in other words, a fiscal union. Due to the present political unfeasibility of such an endeavour, however, concrete steps towards a European Fiscal Union (EFU) have been modest and the revised Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) remains its core building block. As the Pact defines supranational and shapes the creation of national fiscal rules, maintaining its credibility continues to be vital. This article analyses the effects of the fiscal rules on the public finances of the member states. It is assumed that by adhering to the supranational and adopting quality domestic fiscal rules, the member states are better equipped in remaining fiscally prudent, thus also affirming the revamped SGP as a solid base for the furthering of the EFU. The two-track evaluation approach defines dynamic panels for the EFU as a whole and for the selected country groups. It finds certain benevolent effects on budgetary performance at the EFU level, as well as for the countries with higher quality of the fiscal rules.

This article sets out to empirically examine the salience of EU fiscal integration processes between 2007 and 2022. By employing text-mining and qualitative analysis, the previously generated discourse on fiscal integration during and after the financial and sovereign debt crisis, several EU regulatory overhauls, Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis has been tracked. Particularly important have been the new counter-COVID-19 policies such as SURE and NGEU as these substantially impacted the course of common fiscal integration. The assessment covered a body of 160 documents including legal texts, peer reviewed articles, communications and reports of the EU bodies and policy papers, and has relied on the neo(neo)functionalism theory to identify shifts in fiscal integration. The findings show that the discourse on fiscal integration gains prominence with each economic and political crisis and that the shifts can go in the direction of either more (upward) or less (downward) fiscal integration, or involve enough (nil) integration.