Mit dem Beginn der dritten Stufe der Europäischen Wirtschafts- und Währungsunion haben sich die Bedingungen für die Wirtschaftspolitik in den Teilnehmerstaaten grundlegend verändert. Die EWU schafft ein neues Umfeld für die Wirtschaftspolitik, indem sie Interdependenzen der nationalen...

By introducing a new measure of the banking systems' size, the paper challenges the existing consensus on severe underdevelopment of the CEE banking sectors. We argue that the existing studies on the size of CEE banking systems exaggerate the real degree of underdevelopment because common...

We analyze the choice of exchange rate regimes of the 25 transition economies in Europe and the CIS after 1990. The empirical results show that the traditional Optimum Currency Area considerations provide relevant guidance for the exchange rate regime choices in these countries. Moreover, regime...

This paper studies the inflation and interest rate performances since the late 1970s for six former highinflation countries that adopted inflation targeting (IT) in the early 1990’s. Using Germany, Switzerland and the US for comparison, we look at various aspects of central bank performance in...