This book assesses the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the European Union (EU), as well as its response in dealing with an overarching, multidimensional crisis with consequences extending beyond public health safety to political, economic, legal, and institutional arenas. It argues the pandemic represents a symmetric crisis cutting across countries with different social, economic and political characteristics and which yet - despite favouring cooperative solutions at the supranational level - has largely been met with initial responses of a national, even local, nature. So, how well did the EU perform as a crisis manager in the pandemic crisis? This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and readers of crisis, pandemic and health management, European Union politics and governance.

Many economists argued that Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is flawed for the absence of 'conventional fiscal federalism'. They claim that the political-economic rationale of EMU ruled out national mechanisms of adjustment, exposing fragile member states to economic shocks. This, in turn, reinforces the case for 'conventional fiscal federalism' in the European Union (EU). The book engages on a comparative exercise between the EU and five federations where fiscal federalism is key to their political- economic organisation. To that purpose, three analytical dimensions of fiscal policy are tested on the centralisation- decentralisation spectrum: resource allocation, redistribution and macroeconomic stabilisation. The uniqueness of the EU is the independent variable in the comparative analysis. It is, at the same time, the major obstacle to the political feasibility of 'conventional fiscal federalism' in the EU context. To this extent, the book should be useful to students of European integration in general, especially to those working on the political economy of EMU, and to students of federalism.