After the fuzziness in Europe that surrounded the implementation of the excessive deficit procedure foreseen by the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), the European Union had to restore the credibility of the weakened fiscal rule. The constraint was to keep alive the Treaty of Amsterdam. Indeed, an...

To find a lesson to US and UE banking crises, this paper studies the factors associated with the emergence of banking crises during the process of financial liberalisation in a large sample of cross-countries in 1989-1997 using a spatial Durbin model in a panel data econometrics. The empirical...

This paper studies the effects of the TNX ten-year treasury note, the crude oil light sweet, the denatured fuel ethanol, the S%P 500 Stock Index and the US dollar/yen exchange rate on the conditional mean and variance return of corn futures. It employs daily data from January 1, 2002 to August...

EMU's design is seriously flawed. Monetary union was established without political union, creating a single eurozone economy that cannot be governed with the combination of macroeconomic policy instruments that modern national governments have. Its exceptionally independent central bank, the...

In 1991, the European Union undertook to form a full-fledged monetary union. It established the European Monetary Union with a European Central Bank (ECB) at its apex and a mandate to pursue price stability. The European regime differs from the US Federal Reserve System, which must pursue high...

Whatever its successes and difficulties, monetary integration has caused significant changes in many, perhaps most, Eurozone societies. A review of EMU's origins and first years of EMU would thus be remiss without national case studies. France is a particularly good choice for this task. It has...

Originally, in 1997, balanced budget or surplus was set as medium-term objective (MTO) for government budgets under the European Union Stability and Growth Pact, while in 2005 the MTOs were made country-specific. They were agreed for a transitional period only, until the criteria for taking into...

This paper seeks to review a selection of ten salient critical claims about Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) that were heard in the 1990s in either the Political Science literature or the Economics literature or both. In this paper, the author focuses on five salient Political Science claims...

This paper provides a challenging view to the tax harmonisation issue. The literature often proposes tax harmonisation to avoid free-riding behaviours in free-trade areas and more particularly in monetary unions. Without tax harmonisation, tax autonomy may lead to a "race to the bottom". The...