IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/uhhhdp/2.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Public Support for the Euro and Trust in the ECB: The first two decades of the common currency

Author

Listed:
  • Roth, Felix
  • Jonung, Lars

Abstract

This paper examines the evolution of public support for the euro since its introduction as a virtual currency in 1999, using a unique set of data not available for any other currency. We focus on the role of economic factors in determining the popularity of the euro. We find that a majority of citizens support the euro in each individual member country of the euro area (EA). The economic crisis in the EA following the Great Recession led to a slight decline in public support, but the recent economic recovery has strengthened that support, which is now approaching historically high levels after two decades of its existence. We detect a similar, but less pronounced upturn in trust in the ECB during the recovery. Our econometric work demonstrates that unemployment is a key driver of support behind the euro. Given these developments, we discuss whether the large and persistent majority support enjoyed by the euro equips the currency to weather populist challenges during its third decade.

Suggested Citation

  • Roth, Felix & Jonung, Lars, 2019. "Public Support for the Euro and Trust in the ECB: The first two decades of the common currency," Hamburg Discussion Papers in International Economics 2, University of Hamburg, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:uhhhdp:2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/193172/1/hdpie-no02.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Luigi Guiso & Paola Sapienza & Luigi Zingales, 2016. "Monnet’s error?," Economic Policy, CEPR, CESifo, Sciences Po;CES;MSH, vol. 31(86), pages 247-297.
    2. Felix Roth, 2022. "Political Economy of EMU: Rebuilding Systemic Trust in the Euro Area in Times of Crisis," Contributions to Economics, in: Public Support for the Euro, chapter 0, pages 93-136, Springer.
    3. Felix Roth & Edgar Baake & Lars Jonung & Felicitas Nowak-Lehmann D., 2022. "Revisiting Public Support for the Euro, 1999–2017: Accounting for the Crisis and the Recovery," Contributions to Economics, in: Public Support for the Euro, chapter 0, pages 21-45, Springer.
    4. Hobolt, Sara B. & Wratil, Christopher, 2015. "Public opinion and the crisis: the dynamics of support for the euro," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 60788, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    5. Felix Roth & Lars Jonung & Felicitas Nowak-Lehmann D., 2022. "Crisis and Public Support for the Euro, 1990–2014," Contributions to Economics, in: Public Support for the Euro, chapter 0, pages 55-91, Springer.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brouwer, Nils & de Haan, Jakob, 2022. "The impact of providing information about the ECB’s instruments on inflation expectations and trust in the ECB: Experimental evidence," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 73(C).
    2. Castañeda, Juan & Damrich, Sebastian & Schwartz, Pedro, 2020. "A Model Of Parallel Currencies Under Free Floating Exchange Rates," Studies in Applied Economics 160, The Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise.
    3. Brouwer, Nils & de Haan, Jakob, 2022. "Trust in the ECB: Drivers and consequences," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    4. Federico M. Ferrara & Donato Masciandaro & Manuela Moschella & Davide Romelli, 2023. "What do politicians think of technocratic institutions? Experimental Evidence on the European Central Bank," BAFFI CAREFIN Working Papers 23201, BAFFI CAREFIN, Centre for Applied Research on International Markets Banking Finance and Regulation, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy.
    5. Carin van der Cruijsen & Jakob de Haan & Maarten van Rooij, 2023. "The impact of high inflation on trust in national politics and central banks," Working Papers 762, DNB.
    6. Kovács, Olivér, 2020. "Gazellák az iparpolitika tükrében, I [Gazelles and industrial policy, Part 1]," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(1), pages 54-87.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Felix Roth & Edgar Baake & Lars Jonung & Felicitas Nowak-Lehmann D., 2022. "Revisiting Public Support for the Euro, 1999–2017: Accounting for the Crisis and the Recovery," Contributions to Economics, in: Public Support for the Euro, chapter 0, pages 21-45, Springer.
    2. Felix Roth & Lars Jonung & Aisada Most, 2024. "COVID-19 and public support for the Euro," Empirica, Springer;Austrian Institute for Economic Research;Austrian Economic Association, vol. 51(1), pages 61-86, February.
    3. Lucio Baccaro & Björn Bremer & Erik Neimanns, 2021. "Till austerity do us part? A survey experiment on support for the euro in Italy," European Union Politics, , vol. 22(3), pages 401-423, September.
    4. Menna Bizuneh & Steven Buigut & Neven Valev, 2020. "Beyond Borders: The Euro Crisis and Public Support for Monetary Integration in East Africa," South African Journal of Economics, Economic Society of South Africa, vol. 88(4), pages 518-535, December.
    5. Roth, Felix & Jonung, Lars, 2020. "After 25 years as faithful members of the EU. Public support for the euro and trust in the ECB in Austria, Finland and Sweden," Hamburg Discussion Papers in International Economics 6, University of Hamburg, Department of Economics.
    6. Baccaro, Lucio & Bremer, Björn & Neimanns, Erik, 2020. "Is the euro up for grabs? Evidence from a survey experiment," MPIfG Discussion Paper 20/10, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    7. Hideki Nishigaki, 2020. "Coping with Structural Weakness and EMU Citizen Support for the Euro: Opportunities for Change," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 40(4), pages 2755-2768.
    8. Sebastian Blesse & Annika Havlik & Friedrich Heinemann, 2021. "Euro area reform preferences of Central and Eastern European economic experts," Empirica, Springer;Austrian Institute for Economic Research;Austrian Economic Association, vol. 48(1), pages 155-179, February.
    9. Ignacio Jurado & Stefanie Walter & Nikitas Konstantinidis & Elias Dinas, 2020. "Keeping the euro at any cost? Explaining attitudes toward the euro-austerity trade-off in Greece," European Union Politics, , vol. 21(3), pages 383-405, September.
    10. Blesse, Sebastian & Havlik, Annika & Heinemann, Friedrich, 2019. "Searching for a Euro reform consensus: The perspective from Central and Eastern Europe," ZEW Expertises, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, number 201191.
    11. Benito Arruñada & Matthias Krapf, 2019. "Religion and the European Union," International Economic Association Series, in: Jean-Paul Carvalho & Sriya Iyer & Jared Rubin (ed.), Advances in the Economics of Religion, chapter 0, pages 295-308, Palgrave Macmillan.
    12. Andree Ehlert & Jan Seidel & Ursula Weisenfeld, 2020. "Trouble on my mind: the effect of catastrophic events on people’s worries," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 59(2), pages 951-975, August.
    13. Joshua C Fjelstul, 2022. "Explaining public opinion on the enforcement of the Stability and Growth Pact during the European sovereign debt crisis," European Union Politics, , vol. 23(2), pages 192-211, June.
    14. Elske van den Hoogen & Willem de Koster & Jeroen van der Waal, 2022. "What Does the EU Actually Mean to Citizens? An in‐Depth Study of Dutch citizens' Understandings and Evaluations of the European Union," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 60(5), pages 1432-1448, September.
    15. Silvana Târlea & Stefanie Bailer & Hanno Degner & Lisa M Dellmuth & Dirk Leuffen & Magnus Lundgren & Jonas Tallberg & Fabio Wasserfallen, 2019. "Explaining governmental preferences on Economic and Monetary Union Reform," European Union Politics, , vol. 20(1), pages 24-44, March.
    16. Siria Angino & Federico M Ferrara & Stefania Secola, 2022. "The cultural origins of institutional trust: The case of the European Central Bank," European Union Politics, , vol. 23(2), pages 212-235, June.
    17. Farina, Francesco & Tamborini, Roberto, 2017. ""Completing Europe's eonomic and Monetary Union": Any support from the citizens?," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 11, pages 1-26.
    18. Aleberto Alesina & Guido Tabellini & Francesco Trebbi, 2017. "Is Europe an Optimal Political Area?," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 48(1 (Spring), pages 169-234.
    19. Petra Cisková & Emília Zimková & Colin Lawson, 2021. "Visegrad trust in the European Central Bank: common and country specific determinants 2005–2018," Bank i Kredyt, Narodowy Bank Polski, vol. 52(6), pages 495-516.
    20. Daniela Braun & Markus Tausendpfund, 2020. "Electoral Behaviour in a European Union under Stress," Politics and Governance, Cogitatio Press, vol. 8(1), pages 28-40.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Euro; public support; trust; unemployment; optimum currency area; monetary union; ECB;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E42 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Monetary Sytsems; Standards; Regimes; Government and the Monetary System
    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies
    • F33 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - International Monetary Arrangements and Institutions
    • F45 - International Economics - - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance - - - Macroeconomic Issues of Monetary Unions

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:uhhhdp:2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fwhamde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.