This Paper characterizes the integration patterns of international currency unions (such as the CFA Franc zone and the East Caribbean Currency Area). We empirically explore different features of currency unions, and compare them both to countries with sovereign monies, and to regions within...

This paper is concerned with the fact that the incidence of speculative attacks tend to be temporally correlated; that is, currency crises appear to pass ‘contagiously’ from one country to another. The paper provides a survey of the theoretical literature, and analyses the contagious nature of...

A country’s suitability for entry into a currency union depends on a number of economic conditions. These include, inter alia, the intensity or trade with other potential members of the currency union, and the extent to which domestic business cycles are correlated with those of the other...