Fiscal Policy Coordination and the Future of the Community Method

The global financial and sovereign debt crises led to the creation of numerous new agreements and institutions to contain the current crisis and prevent future ones. These measures reinforce the historical trend towards the predominance of intergovernmental decision-making in economic and monetary union (EMU), going so far as to re-intergovernmentalize cooperation that had previously been decided upon by the Community method. Using principal–agent analysis, this contribution looks at fiscal policy cooperation since the outbreak of the sovereign debt crisis and considers how the impact of re-intergovernmentalization is manifested largely in the policy process rather than the policy outcome. However, this is still cause for concern given the precarious nature of EMU’s legitimacy and the loss of efficiency that delegation typically provides.