The financial and economic crisis has questioned the usefulness of several paradigms accepted by the academy and has also favored the research on economic policies. In the current globalized world, the new approaches to conduct macroeconomic policies, and the practical lessons that emerge from empirical analysis, are revealed as necessary tools to understand international economic relations. In this Session we will provide some contributions that show the most recent approaches to overcome a sustainable economic policy making at international level. One of the most debated question is those analyzing the relationship between the fiscal policy and the current account balance. It is the so-called "twin deficits hypothesis", which establishes a direct relationship between the government budget deficit and the current account deficit. The effects of different shocks on the current account dynamics are directly related to the government debt held by foreign investors. The financial crisis has put into question some of the traditional views on how to conciliate domestic and external deficits. In this section we will show the most recent contributions to this area of research. A complementary question we will try to explore, is studying the extent to which monetary policies following a monetary rule could guarantee not only a sustainable monetary path, but also could define a real interest rate trend compatible with exchange rate stability. This is a question particularly relevant for the success and sustainability of monetary and exchange rate policies in monetary unions. So, we will provide some data and conclusions on European case. Next, we will address how in a monetary union, despite the single monetary policy, inflation differentials persist among the member states. This difference of prices causes market failures, provoking distortions mainly in the allocation of resources. Part of these inflation differentials could be explained through the different wages' determination processes in the member states. We also show how the collective bargaining process can influence the prices setting of the economy, depending both on the number of unions and the market structure. Finally, we will discuss some of the recent developments that analyse the effects of currency unions on trade, particularly the effects of the creation of the euro. The traditional empirical evidence shows that sharing a currency union more than triples trade between countries. But these results have been influenced by the financial crisis as well as by the changes on macroeconomic policies' performance previously discussed.