This paper attempts to highlight the main characteristics of the economies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and their plan to form a monetary union by 2010. Several aspects are considered such as the pattern of trade, the monetary side, and the fiscal side. The main conclusion is that the...

Essentially, the impact of the currency union on member countries depends on whether the common currency area is optimal in the sense that the effect of the asymmetric shocks is small, Mundell (1961). Typically, researchers use VAR of different types to analyze the data. For robustness, we use...