Economic and Financial Affairs

The European Union has presented at the United Nations in New York its first Voluntary Review on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The review underlines how the EU has put the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the heart of EU policymaking. This is visible in all major EU initiatives, from the European Green Deal to NextGenerationEU. The European Commission has also integrated the SDGs in the European Semester, the EU's framework for economic and fiscal policy coordination.

Austria and Slovenia have submitted requests to the Commission to modify their respective recovery and resilience plans, to which they also want to add REPowerEU chapters. The Commission will now assess whether Austria and Slovenia's respective modified plans fulfil the assessment criteria in the RRF Regulation.

Italy has submitted a request to the Commission to modify a specific set of milestones and targets of its recovery and resilience plan, corresponding to ten measures included in the 4th payment request. The Commission will now assess whether the modified plan still fulfils the assessment criteria in the RRF Regulation.

The InvestEU Investment Committee has approved a new guarantee, bringing the total number of operations financed by the Council of Europe Development Bank (CEB) and backed by InvestEU to five. The CEB projects are expected to mobilise €252.5 million in financing for affordable social housing, education and training, as well as microfinance and social enterprise finance sectors.

Rocsys BV, a Netherlands-based provider of autonomous charging solutions for electric transport, has signed a €18 million deal with the European Investment Bank (EIB), made possible with the support of the InvestEU programme to accelerate the development and deployment of its second and third generation autonomous robotic charging solutions.

This edition analyses the impact of increasing commodity prices, with a particular focus on energy prices, from three different angles. First, it studies inflation divergence in the euro area inflation, driven by the external shocks but also by internal factors. Second, it discusses the factors driving pass-through of wholesale energy prices to the retail market and how it has diverged across euro area countries. Finally, the issue discusses the impact of the increase in energy costs on firm’s profitability.

This paper provides a quarterly analysis of developments over the last three months of the joint harmonised EU business and consumer surveys (BCS). In addition, it includes a special topic on a new labour hoarding indicator developed by the Commission to more accurately track labour market performance over the cycle.

This paper presents an overview of economic developments in the Western Balkans and Türkiye in the second quarter of 2023.

This paper presents simulations with the Commission’s QUEST model to examine whether rising inflation stemming from a terms-of-trade deterioration could reduce public debt-to-GDP ratios.

This discussion paper presents key findings on the implementation and functioning of MTBFs in the EU over the last decade and on identified past and future challenges.