摘要：The recent financial and economic crisis is the largest
economic shock to hit Europe since the Great
Depression of the 1930s. It has caused dramatic loss-
es in output and employment, and eroded the sustain-
ability of public finances in a number of EU member
states (see Table 1). The crisis has had a strikingly dif-
ferentiated impact on individual EU countries, which
was linked to a number of reasons.1 One of the most
prominent ones was the accumulation of increasingly
large macroeconomic imbalances and expansion in
competitiveness divergences in the pre-crisis period.
The unwinding of these imbalances, particularly in
the euro area, then contributed to the gravity and
propagation of the crisis in a number of member
states by deepening the contraction as well as aggra-
vating the situation of public finances.
