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40-680: The Delors Committee is widely viewed as having been the effective starting point of the process of European Economic and Monetary Union that led to the negotiation of the Treaty of Maastricht in December 1991 and adoption of the euro as the single currency of 11 of the 15 member states of the European Union on 1 January 1999. The immediate context for the Delors Committee was the international monetary instability that followed

80-604: A European currency against the background of an increased economic division due to a number of new nation states in Europe after World War I. In 1957 at the European Forum Alpbach , De Nederlandsche Bank Governor Marius Holtrop argued that a common central-bank policy was necessary in a unified Europe, but his subsequent advocacy of a coordinated initiative by the European Community's central banks

120-530: A journalist, daughter of Altiero Spinelli and Ursula Hirschmann . Padoa-Schioppa died on 18 December 2010, aged 70, after suffering a fatal heart attack during a dinner he had organized in Rome. In 2006, Padoa-Schioppa coined the expression "il tesoretto" (the little treasure) to describe the increased government revenues under his administration. The term was widely used by politicians as they debated how this new money should be spent. In October 2007 he spoke to

160-743: A member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank from 1998 to 2005. Padoa-Schioppa is considered as a founding father of the European single currency . He was a former member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group . He was born in the mountain town of Belluno in north-eastern Italy. Both his parents were intellectuals. His father, Fabio (1911–2012), whom he did not meet until after

200-712: A member of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty and remained one till his death. From 1993–97, he was president of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision , and from 2000-05 Chairman of the Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems . In 1997–98 he was head of Consob, Italy's stock market supervision agency. He was a member of the European Central Bank 's six-member executive board from its foundation in 1998 until

240-527: A parliamentary committee about the government's plan for tax relief (approx. €500/year) to people 20–30 years old still living with their family, saying it would help them move out on their own. He used the ironic or sarcastic term "bamboccioni" (big dummy boys, or big stuffed children) and this created a big fuss in Italian public opinion. Newspapers received numerous letters from readers personally taking offence and pointing out that he understood little about

280-471: A serious threat to Social Europe. In the negotiation process, member states advocated different solutions depending on their political and political characteristics, while the result was a broad compromise. In December 2012, at the height of the European sovereign debt crisis , which revealed a number of weaknesses in the architecture of the EMU, a report entitled "Towards a genuine Economic and Monetary Union"

320-555: A sovereign currency. This is what happened to Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus, and Spain. Being of the opinion that the pure austerity course was not able to solve the Euro-crisis, French President François Hollande reopened the debate about a reform of the architecture of the Eurozone . The intensification of work on plans to complete the existing EMU in order to correct its economic errors and social upheavals soon introduced

360-515: Is effected centrally from the ECB. As a consequence, if member states do not manage their economy in a way that they can show a fiscal discipline (as they were obliged by the Maastricht treaty), the mechanism means a member state could effectively 'run out of money' to finance spending. This is characterized as a sovereign debt crisis where a country is without the possibility of refinancing itself with

400-570: The Council , European Commission , ECB , Eurogroup and European Parliament . The report outlined a roadmap for further deepening of the EMU, meant to ensure a smooth functioning of the currency union and to allow the member states to be better prepared for adjusting to global challenges: All of the above three stages are envisaged to bring further progress on all four dimensions of the EMU: The Historical Archives of

440-641: The European Central Bank published the minutes, reports and transcripts of the Committee for the Study of Economic and Monetary Union ('Delors Committee') in March 2020. Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa , OMRI ( Italian pronunciation: [tomˈmaːzo ˈpaːdoa ˈskjɔppa] ; 23 July 1940 – 18 December 2010) was an Italian banker and economist who served as Italy's Minister of Economy and Finance from 2006 to 2008. He previously served as

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480-755: The European Central Bank . The report was endorsed by the European Council in Madrid in June 1989. It was nevertheless viewed as controversial, not least in the United Kingdom. Following the Madrid meeting, a working group chaired by Élisabeth Guigou with Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa as Vice Chair, known as the Guigou Group, prepared the ground for the opening of an Intergovernmental Conference by

520-698: The European Monetary Cooperation Fund . In response, German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher published a memorandum of his own on 26 February 1988, seizing the initiative from his more conservative colleague finance minister Gerhard Stoltenberg and advocating a European Central Bank modeled on the Deutsche Bundesbank , whose technical design would be defined by a "committee of wise men". Delors leveraged this environment and in late March 1988 managed to convince German chancellor Helmut Kohl , who at that time held

560-562: The European System of Central Banks (ESCB), which would become responsible for formulating and implementing monetary policy. The three stages for the implementation of the EMU were the following: There have been debates as to whether the Eurozone countries constitute an optimum currency area . There has also been significant doubt if all eurozone states really fulfilled a "high degree of sustainable convergence" as demanded by

600-857: The Louvre Accord of February 1987, punctuated by the so-called Basel-Nyborg Agreement on the European Monetary System (EMS) in September 1987 and the Wall Street Black Monday on 19 October 1987. In January 1988, French finance minister Édouard Balladur circulated a memorandum calling for a European common currency to address the EMS's shortcomings, followed in February by another text from Italian treasury minister Giuliano Amato that called for greater firepower of

640-589: The Maastricht Treaty with an enabling clause that became the basis two decades later for European Banking Supervision , with a decision of principle in mid-2012 and implementation in November 2014. There also remained an imbalance between a complete monetary union and a much less complete economic union in the implementation of EMU. The full archive of the Delors Committee is held at the European Central Bank . Economic and Monetary Union of

680-634: The "intellectual impetus" behind the Euro and the "founding father" of the new currency. In an economics paper written in 1982 he pointed out that it is impossible for a group of countries like the EU to simultaneously aim at: These four goals, each apparently desirable on its own, he called "the inconsistent quartet" (see also the similar Impossible trinity concept). At that time, European Union countries maintained some restrictions on trade and (especially) on capital movements. These were gradually eliminated through

720-643: The Committee consisted of the following members (in alphabetical order as listed in Annex II of the report itself): The committee's rapporteurs were Gunter Baer, a BIS official who had worked at the German finance ministry and the International Monetary Fund , and Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa , at the time a senior European Commission official. The committee's meetings were usually held in Basel , on

760-598: The European Council meeting in Strasbourg in December 1989. Viewed in retrospect, the Delors Committee was spectacularly successful, aided in its task by the fall of the Berlin Wall a few months after the delivery of its final report. According to Lamfalussy, the success owes to Delors's "genius" in persuading leaders, and especially Helmut Kohl , of the indispensable nature of monetary union to ensure

800-562: The European Union The economic and monetary union (EMU) of the European Union is a group of policies aimed at converging the economies of member states of the European Union at three stages. There are three stages of the EMU, each of which consists of progressively closer economic integration. Only once a state participates in the third stage it is permitted to adopt the euro as its official currency. As such,

840-455: The IMFC (International Monetary and Financial Committee), the top policy steering committee of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In June 2009 he was appointed as chairman for Europe of the private finance consulting Promontory Financial Group . He was married to the economist Fiorella Kostoris ; they have three children. After their divorce, he became the companion of Barbara Spinelli ,

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880-474: The Maastricht treaty as condition to join the Euro without getting into financial trouble later on. Since membership of the eurozone establishes a single monetary policy and essentially use of a 'foreign currency' for the respective states, they can no longer use an isolated national monetary policy as an economic tool within their central banks. Nor can they issue money to finance any required government deficits or pay interest on government bond sales. All this

920-515: The Single Market programme and the liberalization of capital movements so that by the late 1980s one of the two remaining objectives had to go to for consistency to be maintained. He proposed that the third objective (independent monetary policies) be abandoned, by creating a single currency and a single European central bank, so that the other three objectives could be attained. The Delors Report of April 1989 endorsed this view and recommended

960-662: The crises arising from the non-convertibility of the US dollar into gold in August 1971 (i.e., the collapse of the Bretton Woods System ) and from rising oil prices in 1972. An attempt to limit the fluctuations of European currencies, using a snake in the tunnel , failed. The debate on EMU was fully re-launched at the Hannover Summit in June 1988, when the ad hoc Delors Committee of the central bank governors of

1000-452: The end of May 2005. In October 2005 he became president of Paris-based think tank Notre Europe . On 17 May 2006, he was appointed as Economy and Finance Minister in the government of Romano Prodi , serving in that post until May 2008, when a new government headed by Silvio Berlusconi took office following the April 2008 general election . From October 2007 to April 2008, he was Chairman of

1040-436: The euro. The EMU policies cover all European Union member states. All new EU member states must commit to participate in the third stage in their treaties of accession and are obliged to enter the third stage once they comply with all convergence criteria. Twenty EU member states, including most recently Croatia , have entered the third stage and have adopted the euro as their currency. Denmark , whose EU membership predates

1080-536: The half-yearly rotating presidency of the Council of the European Community, to set up a committee along the lines suggested by Genscher and to directly involve central bank governors in the process. The re-election of French president François Mitterrand in May 1988 further favored a new initiative, on which aides of Delors and Kohl started to work together immediately afterwards. Kohl and Mitterrand cemented an agreement on

1120-653: The introduction of the euro, has a legal opt-out from the EU Treaties and is thus not required to enter the third stage. The idea of an economic and monetary union in Europe was first raised well before establishing the European Communities . For example, the Latin Monetary Union existed from 1865 to 1927. In the League of Nations , Gustav Stresemann asked in 1929 for

1160-589: The keyword "genuine" EMU. At the beginning of 2012, a proposed correction of the defective Maastricht currency architecture comprising: introduction of a fiscal capacity of the EU , common debt management and a completely integrated banking union , appeared unlikely to happen. Additionally, there were widespread fears that a process of strengthening the Union's power to intervene in eurozone member states and to impose flexible labour markets and flexible wages, might constitute

1200-399: The process at a French-German summit in Évian-les-Bains on 2 June 1988. It was thus Delors's idea that the committee should be principally composed of the EU countries' central bank governors, who were both technically most directly in charge and potentially the most opposed to currency unification, since that would make them lose their distinctive national monetary authority. The proposal

1240-597: The side of the monthly meetings of central bank governors at the Bank for International Settlements. The committee's report was titled "Report on economic and monetary union in the European Community". It outlined a three-stage plan for the establishment of the Economic and Monetary Union, including the evolution of the existing Committee of Governors into the European Monetary Institute and ultimately

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1280-455: The situation of a considerable part of the 20–30 years old Italian population, who live on approximately €1,000 per month and cannot afford to leave their parents' house. According to some lexicographers, "bamboccioni" was the most popular new Italian word of 2007. He was the first to describe the euro as "a currency without a State" (in a book published in 2004), a term that was later popularized by Otmar Issing . Padoa-Schioppa has been called

1320-563: The third stage is largely synonymous with the eurozone. The euro convergence criteria are the set of requirements that needs to be fulfilled in order for a country to be approved to participate in the third stage. An important element of this is participation for a minimum of two years in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism ("ERM II"), in which candidate currencies demonstrate economic convergence by maintaining limited deviation from their target rate against

1360-588: The twelve member states, chaired by the President of the European Commission , Jacques Delors , was asked to propose a new timetable with clear, practical and realistic steps for creating an economic and monetary union. This way of working was derived from the Spaak method . The Delors report of 1989 set out a plan to introduce the EMU in three stages and it included the creation of institutions like

1400-543: The viability of the European single market , which allowed him to overcome the resistance of national central banks and especially of the Bundesbank. Also with hindsight, the Delors Report placed insufficient emphasis on matters of financial stability and bank supervision . According to de Larosière, these had been viewed as too divisive for the committee's consensus-driven approach. This was however corrected in

1440-636: The war in 1945, was a teacher and later became a senior executive at the insurance company Assicurazioni Generali. He graduated from Bocconi University ( Milan ) in 1966 and received a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. After his first job in Germany with the retailer C&A Brenninkmeijer , he joined the Bank of Italy in 1968, eventually becoming Vice-Director General from 1984 to 1997. In 1980 he became

1480-702: Was followed by the decision of the Heads of State or Government at their summit meeting in The Hague in 1969 to draw up a plan by stages with a view to creating an economic and monetary union by the end of the 1970s. On the basis of various previous proposals, an expert group chaired by Luxembourg's Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Pierre Werner , presented in October 1970 the first commonly agreed blueprint to create an economic and monetary union in three stages (Werner plan). The project experienced serious setbacks from

1520-460: Was formally made and endorsed at the European Council meeting in Hanover on 27-28 June. Bundesbank president Karl Otto Pöhl initially viewed the fact that the committee chair would be a politician rather than a central banker as unacceptable, but he was eventually persuaded by fellow central banker Wim Duisenberg to participate nevertheless. Aside from its eponymous chairman Jacques Delors ,

1560-467: Was issued by the four presidents of the Council, European Commission, ECB and Eurogroup. The report outlined the following roadmap for implementing actions being required to ensure the stability and integrity of the EMU: In June 2015, a follow-up report entitled "Completing Europe's Economic and Monetary Union" (often referred to as the "Five Presidents Report" ) was issued by the presidents of

1600-468: Was met with skepticism from the heads of the National Bank of Belgium , Bank of France and Deutsche Bundesbank . A first concrete attempt to create an economic and monetary union between the members of the European Communities goes back to an initiative by the European Commission in 1969, which set out the need for "greater co-ordination of economic policies and monetary cooperation," which

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