The boom-bust-crisis-recovery cycle that the euro area has experienced revealed the costs of national and international institutional frameworks that proved inadequate to manage the policy challenges of this period. After the crisis, much has been done to remedy these policy shortfalls, even if the reform agenda is not complete.
National and area-wide policymakers must make use of the improved institutional architecture to do a better job in terms of ex-ante risk management and ex-post crisis management. 1.