The severe crisis that affected the European Monetary Union has emphasized the prevailing interests of national governments and a lack of political leadership of the European institution , while the governance of the euro area has been incapable of an effective crisis management. The present...

European monetary history prior to 1950 presents many attempts at international monetary coordination, but none were as bold and as far reaching as the European Monetary Union envisioned in the Delors Report of 1989 and enacted through the 1991 Treaty on the European Union in Maastricht. This...

Whatever its successes and difficulties, monetary integration has caused significant changes in many, perhaps most, Eurozone societies. A review of EMU's origins and first years of EMU would thus be remiss without national case studies. France is a particularly good choice for this task. It has...

We show the Portuguese transition to the euro, in the framework of political economics, by constructing a bivariate confidence index, based upon Rocha de Sousa (1998, 1999a,b, 2001). Besides we try to understand if the euro functioned as an instrument of politico-economic integration. The...

The present paper applies a gravity model with fixed country effects to M&A flows on a sample of 1215 pairs of countries over the 1998-2001 period, to test the impact of European integration. That model, which had to our knowledge not been applied to M&A flows so far, allows us to observe that...

When does trade become a one-way relationship? We study bilateral trade balances for a sample of 18 European countries over the period from 1948 through 2008. We find that, with the introduction of the euro, trade imbalances among euro area members widened considerably, even after allowing for...

The EMU governance has showed to be incapable of an effective crisis management following the global downturn. The recent decisions by European Council taken in March 2011, named the ‘Pact of the Euro’, to design a new governance of the EMU can be considered a significant attempt to give new...

In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU’s monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional...