Fiscal federalism and a separate budget for the euro area

Abstract

The core objective of this paper is to determine the main political and economic conditions and challenges related to the possible evolution of the integration process in the euro area toward fiscal federalism and fiscal union as a way to increase the capacity of the area to cope with future economic and financial crises. The issue of a separate budget for this area is of particular interest in this article. The idea of such a budget has recently become the subject of lively public debate in the European Union and has been a factor in encouraging the European Commission to propose new solutions at the end of 2017 in the field of economic governance of the euro area, including the establishment of a European Monetary Fund. The analysis carried out in this article leads to the conclusion that under the current conditions, there is little chance of introducing such regulatory and institutional changes that would significantly increase the scale of financial transfers between the euro area member states.

Revenues of Municipalities as a Tool of Local Self-Government Development (Comparative Study)

“…The idea of fiscal federalism was the axis of the political debates that preceded the beginning of the process of economic integration in Western Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This idea was also one of the key issues that always took place in the debate on the next stages of European integration (Oręziak 2018). (Boye 2018) argues that, for reasons of efficiency, higher government should provide "clean" public goods, which are services that are available to all inhabitants, whether or not they contribute to the system-e.g., defense.…”