The European Monetary Union (EMU) has removed crucial instruments of macroeconomic management from the control of democratically accountable governments. Worse yet, it has been the systemic cause of destabilizing macroeconomic imbalances that member states found difficult or impossible to...

I analyse the nature of the design failures of the Eurozone. I argue first that the endogenous dynamics of booms and busts that are endemic in capitalism continued to work at the national level in the Eurozone and that the monetary union in no way disciplined these into a union-wide dynamics. On...

The paper examines why, and under what conditions, certain interest groups adopt positive positions on international economic issues. It provides a case study of how UK trade unions formed their preferences on membership of the EMU. Previous explanations of this have tended to emphasise the...

This paper has three main objectives, namely to (a) propose a new framework that can support placing countries along a core-periphery continuum (beyond the more common binary treatment as either core or periphery), (b) to construct a continuous dynamic theory-based measure (the first, to the...

Andy Rose (2000), followed by many others, has used the gravity model of bilateral trade on a large data set to estimate the trade effects of monetary unions among small countries. The finding has been large estimates: Trade among members seems to double or triple, that is, to increase by...