Assessing the sustainability of external imbalances in the European Union

Abstract

External imbalances are a greater source of concern than public deficits and debts in some countries of the European Union, given their size and evolution. The new macroeconomic imbalance procedure (MIP), which aims at preventing these imbalances, relies on the surveillance of macroeconomic indicators. Some thresholds have been defined for the current account balance and the net international investment position (NIIP), but not for the NED which is taken as an auxiliary indicator in the MIP scoreboard. Prompted by these thresholds, we carried out an analysis of external debt sustainability of EU countries.