The nature of fiscal policies was changed dramatically by the creation of the Eurozone. While prior to the start of the Eurozone, national governments were sovereign in that they could back up the issue of debt by the issue of money, they lost this sovereignty in the Eurozone. This had dramatic...

This paper, after reviewing briefly the early steps of European monetary integration and key elements of the EMU project as reflected in the Treaty of Maastricht, analyses the monetary integration strategy and convergence experience of member states, in particular that of Greece, in the 1990s...

There are some striking similarities between the pre 1914 gold standard and EMU today. Both arrangements are based on fixed exchange rates, monetary and fiscal orthodoxy. Each regime gave easy access by financially underdeveloped peripheral countries to capital from the core countries. But the...

With the 14 members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) having set the objective of adopting a common currency for the year 2018, an expanding empirical literature has emerged evaluating the benefits and costs of a common-currency area in Southern Africa. This paper reviews that...

The origins of the Greek-sovereign debt crisis were the country’s large fiscal and external imbalances. The key factor that abetted those imbalances was the absence of a short-to-medium term adjustment mechanism -- due to perceptions of sovereign bailouts -- in the euro-area that would have...

This paper enumerates the adventures of the drachma step by step, dividing its story into seven parts. Specifically, its main purpose is to present some historical perspective on the behaviour of the monetary and fiscal policies pursued in Greece during the period from the early 1830s until the...

Fixed exchange rate regimes can be regarded as a “rule with escape clauses”, allowing the monetary authorities to temporarily suspend convertibility and enact a discretionary policy only under well-understood contingencies, such as wartime emergencies and financial panics. Seen from this...

Trade is spatial in nature. However, when specifying trade regressions, spatial issues are typically not accounted for in a satisfactory way. We specify a trade model which relates to the effects that the introduction of the euro had on exports for the euro countries. Our model contains country...

The past Greek crisis experience is more or less terra incognita. In all historical empirical studies Greece is systematically neglected or included only sporadically in their cross-country samples. In the national literature too there is little on this topic. In this paper we focus on the Greek...