False promise of a eurozone budget

A KEY question confronts the four presidents of the European Commission, the European Council, the European Central Bank, and the Eurogroup as they prepare their report on how to reform the common currency: Does the eurozone need its own budget?

They are facing the argument that the US’s monetary union works much better because there is a large federal budget to smooth the impact of asymmetric shocks — that is, shocks to individual states. The eurozone, it is claimed, should have its own budget to provide similarly automatic insurance to its members.

This argument, however, misreads the US experience. True, in the US, the federal budget redistributes income across regions, thus offsetting at least part of the inter-regional differences in income. But, while this has been repeatedly documented in many cases, the inference that redistribution is equivalent to a shock absorber is wrong. In the US, the federal budget offsets a substantial part (30-40%) of the differences in per capita income levels across states, because poorer states contribute less income tax, on average, and receive higher transfer payments.