Der Westen droht Russland mit scharfen Sanktionen wegen der militärischen Aggressionen in der Ukraine. Wie wirksam sind Sanktionen? Wieviel kosten sie? Welche Möglichkeiten gibt es, was sind die gegenseitigen Abhängigkeiten?

IPCEI ermöglichen die großvolumige Förderung von transformativen Technologien in einem transnationalen Kontext und bedürfen als Ausnahmen von den beihilferechtlichen Regeln der EU einer Bestätigung durch die Europäische Kommission. Diese Projekte gewinnen als Instrument sowohl der Industriepolitik als auch der Klima-, Umwelt-, Verkehrs- und Energiepolitik zunehmend an Bedeutung. Im Zuge der Neufassung der entsprechenden EU-Mitteilung wurde in Österreich ein breiter Stakeholder-Prozess durchgeführt. Für die Politik in Österreich ergibt sich die Aufgabe, ihre Positionen in die europäischen Diskussionen zur Definition der Wertschöpfungsketten aktiv einzubringen, die Beteiligung an entsprechenden IPCEI-Konsortien abzusichern und die potentiellen Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmer in den vorbereitenden Prozessen bestmöglich zu unterstützen.

Throughout the history of monetary thought, economists have predominantly emphasised the function of money as a medium of exchange along with the intrinsic properties that enhance its saleability and credibility as the most liquid store of value. But the social institution of money co-evolves with technology. It is significant that the advent of digital crypto currencies was initiated by computer scientists and has taken economists completely by surprise. As a consequence, it also forces our profession to rethink the basic phenomenology of money. In accordance with the views of Wieser and Schumpeter, digitization brings to the fore the immaterial function of money as a standard of value and social technology of account, which increasingly absorbs its function as a medium of exchange. The potential impact of this on economic policy is huge. The variety of different crypto coins has proven the technical feasibility of competing private currencies as proposed by Hayek. In the long term, however, there is reason to doubt the persistence of intense competition. One must fear that major digital platforms will extend their current dominance in multisided virtual marketplaces to include digital payments and money. Central banks are increasingly anxious to preserve public sovereignty over the common unit of account and are considering issuing their own digital fiat money. After the current era of intense creative experimentation, the potentially new spontaneous order of private crypto currencies is likely to be supplanted by central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), the design of which will depend on deliberate public choices and policies.

In this paper, we revisit the evidence on the effects of time spent on border‐crossing procedures for international trade using a theory‐consistent structural gravity model. We exploit a rich panel dataset including domestic trade flows and employ a recent econometric estimator that exhibits favourable asymptotic properties for inference. The results indicate a significant negative effect of the time required for border procedures that is driven by the time needed for document preparation. We find that an additional day spent on those procedures corresponds to an ad valorem tariff equivalent of 0.4 percentage points. The parameters of our structural model are used to simulate three counterfactual scenarios, quantifying the effect of past and potential future trade facilitation efforts for middle‐, low‐, and high‐income countries. Full endowment general equilibrium effects suggest that in times of stagnating multilateral and bilateral trade liberalization efforts, unilateral implementation of trade facilitation carries the potential to induce an alternative stimulus for trade and welfare, especially for low‐ and middle‐income countries.

Numerous negative external effects are associated with the transport of goods. Due to the lack of internalising them in transport prices, too many goods are transported over too long distances. Several approaches are taken to reduce external costs, such as bans, regulations, taxes, levies and tradable permits. In some areas, however, such interventions are impractical to implement or do not exist at all. At the EU level external costs associated with the transport of goods are only partially reflected in transport prices. Applying a quantitative model, the analysis investigates a scenario of a coordinated EU approach to internalise external transport costs of extra-EU trade activities. The results reveal a positive effect on real GDP and employment in the EU, provided that the revenues from these trade surcharges are recycled back into the economy. Policy options to achieve that transport prices reflect social costs are identified in the analysis.