This paper discusses the conditions under which currency unions would be desirable and viable. We discuss and present new empirical evidence concerning the operation of existing currency unions in federal states and among regional country groupings. In particular, we examine the traditional...

A monetary union is modelled as a technology that makes surprise devaluations impossible but requires voluntarily participating countries to follow the same monetary policy. It is shown that for low discount factors and sufficiently correlated shocks welfare in the union is higher than that...

If discretionary monetary policy implies an inflation bias, monetary unification boosts the accumulation of public debt. The additional debt accumulation is welfare reducing only if governments are sufficiently myopic. In the presence of myopic governments, debt ceilings play a useful role in...

Economic and monetary reunification in Germany has proved to be more expensive than previously thought - and not just for the Germans. If a `Mezzogiorno' problem of continuing fiscal transfers to the East and possible migration flows westwards are to be avoided, there must be convergence in...

This paper reviews the history, economic rationale and main components of the project of establishing a monetary union in Europe by 1999. The adoption of a single currency is shown to be the best available option following the liberalization of capital movements. Much of the institutional design...

The Paper draws its motivation from the observation that, three years into the single currency, EMU financial markets are making only slow progress towards integration and from the belief that economic history can offer useful insight as to the causes of the phenomenon. In this vein, we...

Does a monetary union need fiscal shock absorbers helping the participating countries to cope with asymmetric shocks? The consensus in the debate over EMU argues that the answer is yes. In this paper, we revisit the issue, building on a dynamic, general equilibrium framework of regions in a...

The combination of discretionary monetary policy, labour-market distortions and nominal wage rigidity yields an inflation bias as monetary policy tries to exploit nominal wage contracts to address labour-market distortions. Although an inflation target eliminates this inflation bias, it creates...