Following several years of diminished importance, the single market seems to have suddenly climbed back up the EU political agenda. CEPS Senior Fellow Jacques Pelkmans applauds its newly elevated status and offers some thoughtful advice to the European Commission on how best to proceed, with specific reference to the EU2020 strategy. He further suggests three good candidates for widening the scope of the single market revival.

In a newly added Postscript to his Working Document, CEPS Director Daniel Gros observes that, in light of the orders of magnitude of the distribution of surpluses in Europe, it seems far-fetched to argue that Germany alone is somehow responsible for the excess spending in the European periphery and that a country like Greece cannot return to a sustainable external position unless Germany fundamentally changes its approach to economic policy.

CEPS’ researchers have once again joined 13 other European think tanks to address recommendations to the current Trio holding the 18-month EU Presidency (Spain, Belgium and Hungary). The team of experts has scrutinised the programme on every major issue (structural reform, economic governance, energy, climate change, migration, internal security, world governance, foreign policy, defence policy, EU institutions, the EU political space and budget) and examined the changing global context in order to make concrete recommendations.

A new report by a CEPS-Assonime Task Force on Bank Crisis Resolution rejects the conventional wisdom that large, cross-border financial institutions must be broken up Its authors argue that alternative solutions exist that can achieve a more stable and resilient financial system without renouncing the benefits of multi-purpose financial institutions and innovative finance.