Closer cooperation between neighbouring countries has throughout the ages been part of their respective political agendas. In many regions of the world, the desire to create efficient economic spaces, and eventually perhaps even political union, has been one of the driving forces behind...

This paper describes the functioning of a currency board within the socio-economic context in which it operates. Special focus is given to the macroeconomic implications of a currency board system compared to a central bank system. In particular the author describes the principles regulating a...

This main sections of this annotated bibliography were prepared by the author between 1998 and 2002. The revisions undertaken until January 2006 are selective and do not claim to be complete. The paper has no official character and merely reflects the views of the author. Its purpose is to...

Muslim scholars of the sixteenth century continued the tradition of writing on economic issues. Their work, however is characterized by the period's overall feature of imitation and repetition and thus reflects hardly any advancement of monetary thought since the works of earlier Muslim...

We analyze the effects of monetary policy on economic activity in the proposed African monetary unions. Findings broadly show that: (1) but for financial efficiency in the EAMZ, monetary policy variables affect output neither in the short-run nor in the long-term and; (2) with the exception of...

Economic theory traditionally suggests that monetary policy can influence the business cycle, but not the long-run potential output. Despite well documented theoretical and empirical consensus on money neutrality in the literature, the role of money as an informational variable for monetary...

This paper proposes a synthetic divergence indicator retracing the influence of domestic and external imbalances for each G5 country on its currency position. This index happens to be equal to the weighted sum of domestic demand pressures and current account disequilibrium, with the weights...

Purpose – While in developed economies, changes in monetary policy affect real economic activity in the short-run but only prices in the long-run, the question of whether these tendencies apply to developing countries remains open to debate. In this paper, we examine the effects of monetary...

This document describes the main issues of the New Basel Accord, highlights the roles and organization of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and offers some arguments against some of the criticism that has been voiced against the...

Purpose – A major lesson of the EMU crisis is that serious disequilibria in a monetary union result from arrangements not designed to be robust to a variety of shocks. With the specter of this crisis looming substantially and scarring existing monetary zones, the present study has complemented...