European Monetary Unification: The Challenges Ahead

This paper reviews the problems that must be resolved at the Intergovernmental Conference in 1996 to clear the way for European Monetary Union: locking in Germany's commitment to the project, and reconciling EMU with variable geometry. It reviews what we know about the costs and benefits of EMU for the interest groups concerned. We conclude, however, that it is not by the cost-benefit calculus of monetary economics that the viability of the monetary union project will be determined. Rather, it is the symbiosis between the Single Market and EMU that is likely to drag the latter, kicking and screaming, into life.