The Chair in European Economic and Monetary Integration at the Robert Schuman Centre was established in 2014 in honour of Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, former Italian Minister of Finance (2006-2008), and a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (1998-2005) during the period preceding the launch of the European Monetary Union (EMU).
Widely recognised as one of the founding fathers of the European single currency, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa was a committed European and a friend of the EUI. In 2009 he donated his archives to the Historical Archives of the European Union; a year later, his family endowed his personal book collection to the EUI Library.
The Programme focuses on the analytical challenges and policy responses of European integration in a rapidly changing global context. The Eurozone crisis revealed the need to design economic institutions that can support a ‘currency without a state’ in the context of a wider European Union. The response to the pandemic crisis has shown the EU’s ability to react under extreme pressure. How to transform that political
The main activities of the Chair will be framed within a newly launched EMU Laboratory - a joint initiative with the Pierre Werner Chair - that will provide the multidisciplinary forum to explore innovative and pragmatic policy and reforms alternatives.
The Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa Chair is generously funded by Banque de France, Banca d’Italia, Pirelli and Unicredit.
EMU Lab Topics
The Chair’s topics of interest derive from research questions on the developments of European economic, monetary and financial integration. The EMU Lab project covers, but is not limited to issues such as:
- Completing Financial Union
- Moves towards Fiscal Union
- EMU and Global Governance
- Reform of the EU budget and options for a central fiscal capacity
- Inflation and monetary policy mix
- Structural reforms and resilient welfare states
- Industrial policy and the EU business model
- The changing institutional equilibrium in the EU (from intergovernmentalism to supranationalism
- The Franco-German relationship and regional alliances (North/South - East/West)