The CFA franc zone has had one of the longest experiences with a fixed exchange rate for a convertible currency and regional integration of any group of developing countries. France, the anchor country, provides aid to support the zone. This paper asks whether the arrangements are more than just...

This paper discusses the timing of monetary integration and supporting economic policies during a rapid and largely uncontrolled process of Korean unification. The paper concludes that the transitory use of a separate currency in each region and supporting economic policies would help limit the...

This paper proposes a quantitative assessment of the welfare effects arising from the Common Monetary Area (CMA) and an array of broader grouping among Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries. Model simulations suggest that (i) participating in the CMA benefits all members; (ii)...

To complement the early warning signals literature, we study the determinants of banking and currency crises for small states and currency boards. Building on the crisis dataset by Laeven and Valencia (2020), we estimate a binominal logit model to identify the determinants of crises, and as a...

This paper highlights that the EMU transition process itself can pose challenges to individual accession countries and draws policy implications for ERM II. Differences in financial market development and international liabilities underscore the risks and benefits of ERM II, and may lead to...

The extreme widening of the exchange rate margins last summer has transformed the EMS from a multilateral fixed rate system into a system of unilateral exchange rate pegging. Professor Neumann characterises the current state of the EMS, outlines the major defects of the system and makes some...

As the recent struggles connected with the readjustment of exchange rates within the European Monetary System have shown, the relatively unproblematic "running in" period of the EMS, which was supposed to be a constructive contribution to the creation of a more viable international monetary...