Rome / AFP Italy’s health minister is proposing doubling a ‘baby bonus’ incentive for couples to have more children to combat what she calls a catastrophic decline in the country’s birth rate. “If we carry on as we are and fail to reverse the trend, there will be fewer than 350,000 births a year in 10 years’ time, 40 ...

  Athens / AFP Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said that Greece will return to the bond markets in 2017, seven years after losing access to the markets due to its debt crisis. “We will return to the markets in 2017,” Tsipras said in an interview with the Realnews weekly newspaper. While the eurozone country has continued to raise funds through short-term, ...

  Frankfurt / AFP The European Central Bank has become too powerful, but largely because politicians have foisted an increasingly political role onto it, one of the German government’s key economic advisors said in a newspaper interview on Sunday. “The ECB has gained enormous power, even though it is not answerable to any parliamentary control. I take a critical view ...