Roel Beetsma is a Professor of Macroeconomics at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. He is also the Director of the Research Programme “The Transformation of Europe” which specializes in research on Macro-economics, Monetary Economics and International Econonomics, with a special reference to Europe. He obtained his Ph.D from Tilburg University, after which he worked at the University of Maastricht and the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. He has been a long-term visitor at DELTA (Paris), the University of British Columbia (Vancouver) and the University of California, Berkeley. His main research interests are fiscal policy, monetary policy, monetary unification, central bank independence and the macroeconomics of pension systems and population ageing. His work has been published in a large number of international journals such as the American Economic Review and the Economic Journal. He is also a member of the Editorial Boards of the European Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Literature. He has been a consultant for the IMF, the ECB, the European Commission, the Dutch Central Bank and the Dutch Ministry of Finance. Finally, he is a member of the Supervisory Board of BNG Capital Management in The Hague.