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, 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...

This paper examines questions related to possible capital account liberalisation in the Mediterranean countries. First, we provide an overview of the extent to which these countries have capital controls along with their exchange rate regimes and some basic macroeconomic aggregates. Second, we...

This paper examines the capital flow experience of transition economies who are also prospective EU members with a view to shedding light on the likely problems they might encounter with exchange rate policy in the run up to euro area membership. We show that they have been experiencing fairly...

The present paper has two aims. The first aim is to test whether six new member states of the European Union (the six Central and Eastern European Countries) form an optimum currency area (OCA) with the eurozone, in an attempt to assess their readiness for euro adoption. The second aim is to...

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 provides an introduction to the special issue “The Crisis in the Euro Area”. We take stock of what the euro area crisis has taught us about monetary integration. At the inception of the euro area in 1999, the main parameters of the theory of monetary integration seemed to have...

The present paper exploits the idea that empirical estimates of the long-run PPP relationship may compound two distinct influences coming from the behavior of market participants and policy makers when the latter are targeting the exchange rate. This tends to bias tests of long-run PPP against...

The earlier 2007/8 financial crisis generated the main lessons for monetary policy, notably that price stability does not necessarily guarantee financial stability. Nevertheless, the on-going Eurozone crisis has pointed to further lessons, notably that a single currency covering diverse states...

The paper aims to provide a deep rationale for banking union in the Euro Area. It shows that the banking sectors of core and peripheral countries were responsible for financing the credit boom that created the imbalances and vulnerabilities that later were at the centre of the crisis. The...