What form could risk sharing take in the euro zone?
Risk sharing in the euro zone refers to a set of mechanisms that spread negative shocks in one country across the other countries. There are three possible types of risk sharing: A sufficiently large euro-zone federal budget, to which struggling countries contribute less than the others; The banking union. If there were pan-European banks, or at least if liquidity flowed freely between the various countries’ banks, three types of shocks would be corrected: country-specific sovereign risk shocks; credit demand shocks; borrower solvency shocks; The capital markets union. If investors’ (savers’) portfolios were diversified across the euro-zone countries, the effects of asset price shocks (resulting from growth or profitability shocks ) in these countries would be spread across all the countries. Ideally, the euro zone would have these three types of risk sharing, just as the United States does.