Decision Making on Excessive Deficits in the EMU

The paper analyses changes in European Union decision making that reflects the new philosophy of flexible integration approved by the 1997 Amsterdam summit. It focuses on the EMU protocol on excessive deficit procedure in the Council of Ministers and formulates a new model for a priori estimates of the influence of member states in the two-stage procedure concerning the identification of excessive deficit and the imposition of sanctions. On the basis of this model the paper estimates the a priori voting power indices of EU member states in decision making vis-a-vis the EMU, depicting the ability of different member states to avoid sanction in the event of excessive deficit.