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Global supply chains offer significant opportunities as well as risks. Since the 2020 pandemic and in the wake of rising geopolitical tensions, several countries have reacted to the challenges posed by integrated global supply chains by adopting a variegated set of measures to secure their production networks by redirecting trade and investment flows. The European Union and the United States have been particularly active on this front by adopting numerous policies to reduce dependencies and increase supply chain resilience and stability. Whereas a number of these policies leverage coordination across the two sides of the Atlantic, several measures also create significant tensions between the two jurisdictions, thereby undermining the potential for coordination in the future.

Paper produced in the framework of the project "La cooperazione economica e tecnologica Ue-Usa di fronte alle nuove sfide geostrategiche e il ruolo dell'Italia".

Manuela Moschella investigates the institutional transformation of central banks from the 1970s to the present. Central banks are typically regarded as conservative, politically neutral institutions that uphold conventional macroeconomic wisdom. Yet in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, central banks have upended observer expectations by implementing largely unknown and unconventional monetary policies. Far from abiding by well-established policy playbooks, central banks now engage in practices such as providing liquidity support for a wide range of financial institutions and quantitative easing. They have even stretched the remit of monetary policy into issues such as inequality and climate change.

With the effects of the latest financial crisis still unfolding, this€is a€timely guide to the politics of international financial reform comparing the policies that the international community requested the IMF to follow in the aftermath of the Mexican, Asian, and subprime crisis.

The paper investigates the factors that led the Italian government to accede to the Fiscal Compact in spite of its demanding requirements for the country's budgetary policy. Specifically, the paper assesses the extent to which Italian government's support for the Fiscal Compact was driven by the logic of the 'vincolo esterno' in a replication of the pattern that led Italy to sign the Maastricht Treaty. The paper finds only limited support to the 'vincolo esterno' argument. Rather than being motivated by domestic dysfunctions or socialization to the fiscal discipline doctrine, the Italian government acted mainly out of market punishment fears. Interestingly, however, three factors filtered such external pressures and contributed shaping government's support for the new Treaty. First, the Economic and Monetary Union unfinished architecture, and in particular the lack of a European financial firewall, weakened opposition to the new Treaty. That is to say, the institutional context constrained the choices that Italian policymakers could pursue. Second, the pro-European orientations of government members contributed to elevating the new Treaty to a symbol of European integration. Finally, the Italian government confronted a quite large domestic win-set during the negotiations, as the parties supporting the Monti government also supported Italy's participation to the new Treaty.

This article argues that the integration of financial assistance capacity in the eurozone, which was meant to remedy institutional shortcomings and mitigate the distributional implications of financial support in the European Monetary Union (EMU), has instead contributed to a deepening of the existing political cleavages and the creation of new ones. This dysfunctional effect reflects the empowerment ofsomenational parliaments in decisions on financial assistance. These arguments are tested against the empirical examination of the negotiations of the three adjustment programmes for Greece. Specifically, the article shows that negotiations moved towards the radicalization of creditors' positions and increased divisions between creditors in conjunction with the development of financial assistance capacity. While advancing its theses, the article strikes a note of caution regarding the argument that the empowerment of national parliaments in EU policymaking is one of the most powerful antidotes to its legitimacy deficit and thus a safeguard for the integration project.

The purpose of this paper is to consider certain consequences of large post-crisis capital flows in advanced economies. Specifically, I offer an examination of the Swiss response to large capital inflows during the early stages of the global financial crisis. Why did the Swiss National Bank (SNB) intervene in the foreign exchange market and introduce an exchange rate floor? Why did the SNB gamble with its highly valued anti-inflationary reputation in attempting to stem the appreciation of the Swiss franc? To answer these questions, this paper suggests a broader and more complete explanation than one that focuses solely on the configuration of domestic interests. Specifically, the paper argues that a thorough explanation of the SNB's response requires accounting for the changing monetary paradigm of the central banking community. This emerging monetary paradigm influenced the SNB's policy decisions by making the SNB particularly sensitive to financial stability risks and by providing it with the policy space to experiment with (macroprudential) tools to manage these risks. Adapted from the source document.

Research Highlights and Abstract This article Contributes to the literature on ideational change by bringing to the surface an incremental ideational dynamic after major crises that differs from the well-known punctuated dynamic; Explains the incremental dynamic of ideational change after a major crisis based on the flexibility of the institutional environment in which actors operate. Specifically, rather than preventing change until an explosion of radical change occurs, institutional frictions may also allow for successive adjustments over time; Illustrates the theoretical arguments by examining the changes that have taken place in the IMF's thinking on capital controls since the start of the 2008 crisis; Traces one of the most debated developments in the post-crisis international political economy, namely the rehabilitation of capital controls. Although much scholarly attention has been devoted to examining the punctuated dynamics of ideational change, other dynamics exist. Ideational change may well occur incrementally in ordinary times or, as this study shows, can also materialise after a major shock, such as a financial and economic crisis. By examining the IMF's new approach to capital controls in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the article demonstrates that the non-punctuated nature of ideational change can be explained in light of the enabling (and not solely constraining) features of the institutional context in which actors operate. Rather than preventing change until an explosion of radical change occurs, institutional frictions may also allow for successive adjustments over time. They may in fact allow for a gradual release of pressure, thereby preventing the impending explosion.

AbstractThe paper examines the macroeconomic imbalance procedure (MIP) with the purpose of assessing its potential effectiveness compared to International Monetary Fund (IMF) surveillance. The comparison reveals that the MIP performs better than the Fund's surveillance in terms of the provision of clear and practical advice, knowledge of domestic polities and ease of activating sanctions. Neither the MIP nor the IMF, however, provide for mechanisms to prevent political considerations from interfering with the activation of sanctions and the distribution of the burden of adjustment. The MIP also does not attenuate problems of asymmetric treatment that create the conditions for public backlashes. Its single‐country focus and the limited integration of macroeconomic and financial analysis are further factors that may undermine the effectiveness of the MIP. In the conclusions, the paper reflects on the factors that may help explain the limited incorporation of the lessons available from the Fund's experience into the MIP.