It is true that a closer coordination of fiscal and economic policies is envisaged by Articles 98, 99 and 104 of the EC Treaty, and by what is known as the Stability and Growth Pact (i.e. above all: decisions on common features of economic policy and mutual budget surveillance), but these coordination mechanisms still have to prove their worth in practice.
Okun’s Law is named for economist Arthur Okun who, in the early 1960s, showed that in the United States, unemployment tended to fall by 1 percentage point for every three percentage point rise in GDP. 3  T. Macklem, “Information and Analysis for Monetary Policy: Coming to a Decision,” Bank of Canada Review (Summer 2002): 11–18.