By Sandrine Levasseur

How to put public finances on a good track when (almost) all measures regarding spending cuts and tax increases have been already exhausted? Croatia’s government has been seeking to solve this tricky problem since mid-November when an excessive deficit procedure (EDP) was launched against the country. Let us explain what an EDP means: the public deficit of Croatia currently exceeds 3% of GDP; the breach is neither exceptional nor temporary; consequently, the government of Croatia has to curb its public deficit in a lasting way.

On 28 January 2014, the EU Council will propose (1) the time limits within which Croatia must reduce its deficit below 3% of GDP and (2) the average annual amounts of deficit reduction during the period. Yet, (3) the EU council will invite formally the government of Croatia to propose concrete measures towards reducing the deficit-to-GDP ratio below 3%.

The problem facing the government of Croatia is not straightforward since the proposed measures should not further depress the economy. Currently, only modest signs of recovery are in sight in Croatia, and its unemployment rate stands at a high level (16.5%). The country is among the poorest EU members: its GDP per capita is 62% of that of the EU-28.

Briefing Paper n° 6 aims at proposing a list of measures that an EU country under EDP such as Croatia could envisage. For each measure, we present the main arguments “in favor of” it and “against” it in general terms. Then, we discuss the relevance of every measure for Croatia. Note that our list of measures is suitable for both advanced and less advanced EU countries. More generally, our list could be used for any country facing public finance problems and looking for solutions.

Three measures (out of seven) seem to us particularly relevant in the case of Croatia:

–          the use of service concession contracts;

–          the privatization of some state-owned enterprises;

–          the improvement of tax collection and compliance.

The first two measures are related to the need to restructure state-owned enterprises that are inefficient due to poor management. In particular, state-owned enterprises which are neither natural monopolies nor of strategic importance (i.e. in the tourism and agriculture sectors) should be privatized. Privatization of other state-owned enterprises should be envisaged more carefully, but not excluded. Croatia is the first country to join the EU with such a high share of state-owned enterprises (25%), and the slow pace of privatization has hindered growth. More privatizations will result in (long-run) gains even if causing (short-run) pains, in particular layoffs among the workforce. Service concession contracts are another way of restructuring the state-owned sectors. The impact on public finances is different, though. Services concession contracts provide a regular source of revenues for the government (through receipts of concession fees) and/or of savings (through lower payments of government subsidies). By contrast, immediate and potentially large amounts of cash can be obtained from the proceeds of privatization.

Recommending a restructuring of state-owned enterprises in Croatia is not a novelty. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Commission have repeatedly stated that the pace of privatization or service concessions should be accelerated to raise the efficiency of the economy. Currently, the government of Croatia is actively engaged in accelerating such a process, in particular for service concessions. A few recent concessions include Zagreb’s airport and Rijeka’s port, while motorways and Brijuni’s island have also been proposed to bidders.

Croatia’s citizens do not always support the restructuring process. To obtain greater public acceptance of privatization and service concessions, communication should be improved and intensified. In particular, the budgetary authorities should explain what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what the long-run benefits of their actions will be. Otherwise, the restructuring of state-owned enterprises will be perceived as a gift to the private sector. Last but not least, the process of privatization and service concessions should be more controlled to prevent misguided choices, abuse or conflicts of interest. That also means fighting corruption.

The improvement of tax collection is the third measure that we advocate to curb Croatia’s public deficit. According to the Institute of Public Finance, the cumulated uncollected tax revenues in Croatia would amount to HRK 40bn, which represents more than twice the projected public deficit for 2014 (HRK 19.3bn). Should the government be capable of collecting at least a portion, it would give a little breathing room to the public finances. In Croatia, increasing the tax collection means several interrelated things: fighting the grey economy (since unreported incomes are untaxed incomes) and prosecuting tax fraud (otherwise, rules and procedures are useless). Again, tighter control means fighting corruption.

By contrast, other measures such as wage cuts in the public sector or low corporate tax rates do not appear suitable to put the public finances of Croatia on track.

Further details can be found at http://www.ofce.sciences-po.fr/pdf/briefings/2014/briefing6.pdf .

By Jérôme Creel, Paul Hubert and Fabien Labondance

What relationship can be established between the degree to which an economy is financialized (understood as the ratio of credit to the private sector over GDP), financial instability and economic performance (usually GDP per capita) in the European Union (EU)?  A recent working paper [1] attempts to provide a few answers to this question.

Two major competing approaches can be found in the economic literature. On the one hand, an approach inherited from Schumpeter emphasizes the need for entrepreneurs to access sources of credit to finance their innovations. The financial sector is thus seen as a prerequisite to innovative activity and a facilitator of economic performance. On the other hand, financial development can be viewed instead as the result or consequence of economic development. Development implies increased demand for financial services on the part of households and businesses. There is therefore a source of endogeneity in the relationship between financial development and economic growth, as one is likely to lead to the other, and vice versa.

Until recently, analytical studies that attempted to disentangle and quantify these causalities showed a positive significant link between an economy’s financial depth and its economic performance (Ang, 2008). However, the onset of the international financial crisis led to nuancing these conclusions. In particular, Arcand et al. (2012) showed that beyond a certain level the impact of increased financialization becomes negative [2]. The relationship between financialization and economic performance can be represented by a bell curve: positive at the beginning and then, from a level of 80%-100% for the private credit to GDP ratio, fading to zero or turning negative.

Unlike other works that include both developed and emerging or developing countries, our study focuses on the EU Member States from 1998 to 2011. The advantage of this sample is that we include only economies whose financial systems are developed or at least in advanced stages of development [3]. Moreover, it is a relatively homogeneous political space that permits the establishment of common financial regulations. We adopt the methodology of Beck & Levine (2004) who, using a panel and instrumental variables, are able to resolve the endogeneity issues discussed above. Economic performance is explained by the usual variables in endogenous growth theory, namely initial GDP per capita, the accumulation of human capital over the average years of education, government expenditure, trade openness and inflation. In addition, we include the aforementioned financialization variables. We show that, contrary to the usual results in the literature, an economy’s financial depth does not have a positive impact on economic performance as measured by GDP per capita, household consumption, business investment or disposable income. In most cases, the effect of financialization is not different from zero, and when it is, the coefficient is negative. It is therefore difficult to argue that financial and economic development go hand in hand in these economies!

In addition, we included in these estimates different variables quantifying financial instability so as to check whether the results set out above might be due simply to the effects of the crisis. These financial instability variables (Z-score [4], CISS[5], bad debt rate, the volatility of stock market indices and an index reflecting the microeconomic characteristics of Europe’s banks) usually seem to have a significant negative impact on economic performance. At the same time, the variables measuring the degree of an economy’s financialization show no obvious effects on performance.

These various findings suggest that it is certainly unrealistic to expect a positive impact of any further increase in the degree of financialization of Europe’s economies. It is likely that the European banking and financial systems have reached a critical size beyond which no improvement in economic performance can be expected. Instead, there are likely to be negative effects due to the financial instability arising out of a financial sector that has grown overly large and whose innovations are insufficiently or poorly regulated.

The findings of this study suggest several policy recommendations. The argument of the banking lobbies that regulating bank size would have a negative impact on growth finds absolutely no support in our results–quite the contrary. Furthermore, we show that financial instability is costly. It is important to prevent it. This undoubtedly requires developing a better definition of micro- and macro-prudential standards, together with effective supervision of Europe’s banks. Will the forthcoming banking union help in this regard? There are many sceptics, including the economists of Bruegel, the Financial Times and the OFCE.

[1] Creel, Jérôme, Paul Hubert and Fabien Labondance, “Financial stability and economic performance”, Document de travail de l’OFCE, 2013-24. This study was supported by funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 266800 (FESSUD).

[2] We consider this work in an earlier post.

[3] In addition to the ratio of private sector credit to GDP, the depth of financialization is also indicated by the turnover ratio, which measures the degree of liquidity of financial markets, measured as the ratio of the total value of shares traded to total capitalization.

[4] Index measuring the stability of banks based on their profitability, their capital ratio and the volatility of their net income.

[5] Index of systemic risk calculated by the ECB and including five components of the financial system: the banking sector, non-bank financial institutions, money markets, securities markets (stocks and bonds) and foreign exchange markets.

By Christine Rifflart

Despite the further decline in the US unemployment rate in December, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released last week confirms paradoxically that the American labour market is in poor health. The US unemployment rate fell by 0.3 percentage point from November (-1.2 points from December 2012) to end the year at 6.7%. The rate has fallen 3.3 percentage points from a record high in October 2009, and is coming closer and closer to the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), which since 2010 has been set by the OECD at 6.1%. However, these results do not at all reflect a rebound in employment, but instead mask a further deterioration in the economic situation.

While the unemployment rate is the standard indicator for summarizing how tight a labour market is, this can also be considered using two other indicators, i.e. the employment rate and the labour force participation rate – in the US case, these give a different view of the state of the labour market (see chart).

After falling nearly 5 percentage points in 2008 and 2009, the employment rate has been constant for 4 years, at the level of the early 1980s (58.6%, following a peak of 63.4% at end 2006). Since then, the decline in the unemployment rate has reflected the decline in the participation rate, a trend that is confirmed by the figures for December. Over the period 2010-2013, the participation rate lost a little more than 2 percentage points, to wind up at end December at its lowest level since 1978 (62.8%, following a peak of 66.4% at end 2006).

This poor performance is due to insufficient job creation, which has a threefold impact. Despite positive GDP growth – which contrasts with the recession in the euro zone – demand is far from sufficient to reassure business and revitalize the labour market. After four years of recovery, at end 2013 employment has still not returned to its pre-crisis level. Net creation of salaried jobs in the private sector has not even been sufficient to absorb the demographic increase in the working age population. As a result, the employment rate is not improving from where it bottomed out.

Moreover, the difficulty in finding employment is encouraging the exit or delaying the entry or return of people who are old enough to participate in the labour market. This effect, familiar to economists, is called effet de flexion (“bending effect”) in French: young people are encouraged to study longer, women stay at home after raising their children, and unemployed people become discouraged and stop looking for work. Despite the resumption of economic growth and job creation, this effect continued to be felt in full in 2013. While the reduction in the participation rate slowed in 2011 and 2012 – the growth of the labour force was once more positive but remained lower than that of the working-age population – it accelerated in 2013 with the decline in the labour force. During the second half of 2013, 885,000 people were in effect diverted away from the labour market, due in particular to the more difficult economic and social conditions.

Companies seem reluctant to rehire in the particularly difficult economic context. The fiscal shock in early 2013 depressed activity: GDP growth fell from 2.8% in 2012 to an expected level of about 1.8% in 2013. There will be additional fiscal adjustments in 2014. Beyond drastic cuts (related to sequestration [1]) in state spending, some exceptional measures that have been in force since 2008-2009 for the poorest households and the long-term unemployed (3.9 million out of the 10.4 million unemployed) are coming to an end and have not been renewed. According to estimates by the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), 1.3 million unemployed who have exhausted their entitlement to basic benefits (26 weeks) and who have enjoyed an exceptional extension will find themselves without support as of 1 January 2014 due to the non- renewal of the measure, and nearly 5 million unemployed will be affected by the end of the year.

There is a risk of growing numbers of people falling into poverty in this situation. According to the Census Bureau, since 2010 the poverty rate has been about 15%. However, again according to the CBPP, unemployment benefits would have prevented 1.7 million people from falling below the poverty line. The greater difficulties facing the long-term unemployed and the withdrawal of part of the population from the labour market are the direct result of a morose labour market, which is not indicative of a continuous decline in the unemployment rate.

[1] See America’s fiscal headache written 9 December 2013.

By Xavier Timbeau, Twitter: @XTimbeau

(published in Le Monde on Thursday 16 January 2014, p. 17)

When he was elected François Hollande made fiscal discipline his main goal. The 2008 crisis was continuing to have an impact on the developed economies; in the face of a sovereign debt crisis, Europe’s governments had been implementing austerity measures that were to cause a second recession, a “double dip”, to use the language of economists. For example, when François Hollande came to power, the situation in France seemed disastrous: the public deficit was 5.2%, with a rise in the public debt of more than 600 billion euros since 2008 along with a 2-point rise in unemployment (to 9.6% of the workforce). The pressure was intense, and, the euro zone states were falling like dominos, with Spain and Italy in danger of following Greece, Portugal and Ireland. In this context, it seemed that only budgetary discipline could help Germany to support a faltering euro zone.

Yet the worst was still to come. By underestimating the magnitude of the fiscal multipliers (the impact of fiscal policy on activity), as was eventually recognized by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Commission, and as we had pointed out in July 2012, the consequences of generalizing this unprecedented fiscal effort throughout the European Union were dismissed.

What Francois Hollande had presumed would be a painful recovery preceding a rebound that would open up new possibilities proved instead to be a period of economic stagnation, where rising unemployment went in hand with bad fiscal news. When the fiscal multiplier is high, nothing works. The budget efforts were weighing down economic activity, and there was no real re-absorption of the government deficits. If this infamous multiplier had been low, François Hollande’s strategy – and that of the euro zone as a whole – would have worked. But the multiplier is not at our beck and call; it was the result of an economic situation in which the balance sheets of agents were degraded, with the banks suffocating and expectations dire.

The second part of François Hollande’s five-year term, which the press conference of 14 January 2014 was to launch, is now much more complicated than expected. Instead of a recovery in public finances, the debt has barely been stabilized despite an incredible effort. Instead of a strong recovery, what we have is, in the understated language of the INSEE, a “sluggish recovery”, which really amounts to continuing recession, with unemployment rising relentlessly. Our businesses are anaemic, and to try to restore their margins, the tax credit for competitiveness and employment (the “CICE”), inspired by the Gallois report, has not really injected new blood.

To lower the cost of labour without increasing the deficit, households, though exhausted, have to be hit again. The fiscal multiplier is still high, and growth, along with a reversal in the trend in unemployment, is being postponed. Worse, the commitment to Brussels to reduce the public deficit (a structural effort of 0.8 GDP point by the end of the five-years, i.e. 50 billion euros in total) will postpone a reduction in unemployment until after 2017. The patient may well die from the cure, and at best it will be Hollande’s successor in the 2017 elections, which he’s lost in advance, who might hope to reap the benefits of a policy that prioritized deficit reduction at the worst possible time.

The responsibility pact now proposed by François Hollande is setting out a different path, a different choice. Instead of austerity, a reduction in the cost of labour is to be financed not by taxes but by fiscal spending (amounting to 1 GDP point). The bet is that the growth stimulated will bring in additional revenue to meet the commitments on the public deficit. A reduction in social charges of thirty billion euros was announced, replacing the current CICE (20 billion). This means an additional 10 billion euros that can be obtained by companies that are to engage in collective bargaining under the watchful eye of a bipartisan watchdog. While this does not simplify the complex CICE, it will promote social dialogue.

On the other hand, François Hollande confirmed that the target for cutting public expenditure remains, i.e. 16 billion euros in 2015 and 18 billion in 2016 and 2017, for a total of 50 billion, with no increase on previous announcements. The CICE was partially funded by an increase in VAT (6 billion euros from 2014) and environmental taxes (4 billion). Replacing the CICE with cuts in social charges gives room for finesse: if companies benefit from the lower labour costs to boost their profits, then taxes on these profits will reduce the bill for the state by 10 billion euros (one-third of 30 billion). If, however, they increase employment and wages or lower their prices or invest, then there will be an increase in activity and the financing will come through growth.

Compared with France’s budget commitments to Brussels (an 0.8 point reduction in the structural deficit every year), there will be a 20 billion euro fiscal stimulus based on lowering labour costs by 2017. This GDP point could lead to the creation of 250,000 jobs by 2017 and allow a one-point drop in unemployment. This is a substantial change of course from the priority given up to now to deficit reduction. A choice has been made to focus on business and push companies to create new activity or jobs through a pact. This is a significant step, but there is still more to be done to put an end to austerity, to repair the social damage done and to take radical action to reduce unemployment.

By Guillaume Allègre

Editor’s note: This post was first published on the OFCE blog on 21 October 2013, when the issue of car with driver services was a subject of intense debate. Given the recent events in France, it seemed appropriate to republish this text by Guillaume Allègre.

 “What’s worse is that everyone has their reasons”

 Jean Renoir, La Règle du jeu

In the war between taxis and chauffeur-driven private cars (voitures de tourismes avec chauffeur – VTCs), everyone has their reasons. We noted in a previous post that the discourse on innovation masked a classic conflict over distribution between producers, who want to defend their incomes, and consumers, who want an inexpensive quick-response taxi service including at peak times. This conflict is coupled with another no less classic one between holders of licenses with a scarcity value and new entrants, who support opening up the market.

In this conflict the current regulatory system is absurd. Limiting the number of taxi licenses was intended to support the income of independent taxis and prevent them from working too many hours per day to achieve a decent income. However, the authorities have committed two errors. First, by allowing the transfer of licenses, they transferred the benefit of quotas on taxi drivers to the license owners: a taxi driver now must either rent their license or buy it at a price reflecting its scarcity value (230,000 euros in Paris in 2012!). The current situation is even more absurd given that new licenses are allocated free of charge  (to a waiting list): if the préfet allocates 1000 new licenses for free, then a value of 230 million euros at market prices will be transferred to the fortunate winners (who may subsequently rent out the licenses)!

The second error is that the government has allowed the taxi license bubble to expand. The high price of licenses clearly reflects that supply is too low relative to demand. But it would now be unfair to penalize those who have just spent a fortune acquiring a license by, for example, massively increasing their number: why should recent purchasers pay for the shilly-shallying of the regulatory authorities?

What’s the solution?

It would be preferable to put an end to a system that generates constant worry about the value of licenses issued for free. But redeeming all the licenses at their market price would be costly and would result in the unjust enrichment of those who received a license for free.

One solution, which was proposed in the previous post, is to buy the current licenses over time (as taxi drivers retire), not at their market value but at their acquisition value plus interest, and to assign new licenses that are free but not transferable. This system would compensate recent purchasers, without contributing to the unjust enrichment of those who have obtained a license for free or at a very low price. It would allow a transition from a system of transferable licenses to a system of non-transferable licenses in which the number of licenses in circulation and the division of the market between chauffeured cars and taxis would depend on the demand for services and not on the nuisance power of one or the other party. This system is of course complex, but it would help to overcome past mistakes in the fairest way possible.

For further information:  Chauffeur-driven private cars: Victory of the anti-innovation lobby?

To contact the author: guillaume.allegre@sciencespo.fr

To follow the author on Twitter: @g_allegre

By Loïc Charles and Guillaume Daudin*

Recurrent questions on our economies are, to quote a few: Which factors and actors are key for economic development? What private and public behaviors are particularly growth-enhancing? How important are institutions and policies in shaping trade, in promoting innovations and then growth?…There are different ways of enhancing our knowledge to answer these questions. The first way consists in laboratory experiments where a small-scale environment is created in order to understand “how the different pieces of the system work and interact” This is particularly appropriate for learning on social preferences and dealing with welfare issues. But, as soon as questions related to growth – such those mentioned above – are concerned, laboratory experiments do not appear very suitable. One other way of enhancing our knowledge consists in analyzing what happens today in our country and, possibly, to carry out international comparisons in order to disentangle between what is “good” and what is “bad” for the economy. Once one is engaged in that direction, why stop at comparison across space? Analyzing what happened several decades or centuries ago and to learn from these past experiences for the current period can also be very fruitful.

The project “Transformations of the French Economy through the Lens of International Trade, 1716-1821” (TOFLIT18) follows this direction. The 4-year project, granted funding by ANR, was launched on the 1^st January 2014.

In few words, the project aims at analyzing the French economy during the period that laid the economic ground for the entry of France and Europe in the modern industrial era. Its main tools are the retranscription, the use and the diffusion of French international trade statistics.

The French administrative trade statistics are the most comprehensive and coherent source of quantitative information available for the French economy at that time. These data were produced locally and aggregated at the national level by the Bureau de la Balance du Commerce from 1716 on (Charles and Daudin ,2011). Despite several administrative reshufflings, the techniques of gathering and presenting the statistics on French foreign trade went almost unchanged up to the 1820s: they provided the total value, and sometimes the unit values, of merchandise and partner-specific trade flows; we have already photographed an almost complete series of yearly statistics. These documents are unique as they provide quantitative information on several geographical levels. As such, they can be used to study the economic effects of international trade on the French economy as a whole, on the economy of a single region, of a port town as well as on the economic behaviors of individual agents, e.g. a merchant or a community of merchants from a single town/region. They can also be used to get a more accurate understanding of the interplay that existed between these different geographical levels.

The volume and dispersion of primary sources makes the process of collecting and putting them into a usable form both time-consuming and costly. Our team includes therefore social scientists with consolidated experience in the construction and management of large databases (notably MARPROF, NAVIGOCORPUS, RICardo and SoundToll Registers Online). They will bring their expertise to cross-test our dataset with other types of information on trade (shipping and merchants accounts). The collaboration of researchers who are currently working on similar set of foreign trade statistics for important economic partners of France at that period– Great-Britain and the Austrian Netherlands – will allow both crosschecking and building comparative studies.

The result database will include the bilateral value (with 20-30 different partners) of trade flows at the national level from 1716 to 1821, a merchandise (600-1000 different goods) and partner breakdown from at least 1750 onward, unit values and quantities from 1771 to 1792 and regional trade data. The project will transfer this database in the public domain and make it easily useable by the research community. The collected data can partly substitute for the lack of domestic macroeconomic series.

We will use the data to improve our knowledge of the French economy and our understanding of the economic mechanisms at work, both at the national and regional level. Two main avenues of research will be privileged. First, we will investigate the evolution of French specialization, both across French regions and in comparison to other countries. How was it linked to the contrasted economic development of France and Britain? What does it tell us on the determinants of international trade? Second, we will study the effects of policy choices on the French economy: France went through several wars and politic upheavals. It also went through stark changes in its commercial policies: from mercantilism to mitigated free trade in the 1760s with its colonial empire, to a number of free-trade treaties in the 1780s, followed by the closing up of the economy under the Empire. What were the effects of these policy choices?

All these questions resonate particularly to our contemporary ears. More importantly, the answer to these questions can provide a renewed glance on the functioning of the (French) economy, both then and now.

For more details, please contact Guillaume Daudin

—–

*Guillaume Daudin est chercheur associé à l’OFCE.

By Céline Antonin

On 1 January 2014, Latvia will become the 18th member of the euro zone, two years after its Estonian neighbour. From a European perspective, Latvia’s entry into the “euro club” may seem of merely incidental importance. The country accounts for only 0.2% of euro zone GDP, and its integration is above all politically symbolic – it represents the culmination of the fiscal and monetary efforts undertaken by the country, which was hit hard by the crisis in 2008-2009 that slashed its GDP by almost a fifth.

At the end of 2008, facing an emergency situation, the country requested international assistance from the IMF and the European Union, which granted this in return for a drastic austerity plan. The aid came to some 7.5 billion euros, about one-third of the country’s GDP. The national debt thus rose sharply between 2007 and 2012, from 9% of GDP to 40%. Latvia undertook a fiscal purge in order to boost its competitiveness and reduce its public deficit by drastically lowering public spending, wages and pension payments. This internal devaluation strategy led to sharp disinflation, which allowed Latvia to meet the ERM II goal for price stability (see chart). In accordance with IMF advice, the country has stuck to its goal of joining the euro zone quickly while categorically refusing to use the weapon of an external devaluation to get out of the crisis. It has for instance adhered to its policy of maintaining a fixed exchange rate against the euro without interruption since 1 January 2005.

2011 saw the country’s return to growth, which was driven mainly by external demand from the Nordic countries and Russia. As for the public deficit, it rose from 9.8% of GDP in 2009 to 1.3% in 2012. Sovereign bond rates have fallen, which enabled the country to borrow only 4.4 billion euros (instead of the 7.5 billion planned) and to repay its debt to the IMF (three years in advance). Public debt has stabilized at around 40%. In addition, Latvia has met its inflation target over the reference period used to decide the issue of its euro zone membership. These various factors led the European Union to give it the green light in June 2013.

So is the entry of Latvia of merely incidental importance? Not entirely. First, Latvia has still not erased the scars of the crisis; in 2012, GDP was below its 2007 level in real terms. Furthermore, while the unemployment rate has been cut almost in half since 2009, it still represents 11.9% of the workforce, and most importantly, this reduction has been due in part to high emigration. But above all, as was pointed out by the European Central Bank in its Convergence Report, nearly one-third of bank deposits (a total of 7 billion euros) are held by non-residents, particularly from Russia. As with Cyprus, this poses a high risk to banking stability in a crisis situation, with the potential for capital flight. At a time when the proposed banking union is stumbling up against the heterogeneity of the euro zone’s banking systems, this illustrates yet again that it is very difficult to reconcile the logic of economic integration with the political choice of enlargement. Whether at the level of the euro zone or at the level of the European Union, it is time for Europe to make a clear choice between these two opposing logics.