This paper considers the nature and the distribution of trade and FDI effects of a potential enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) to the 10 countries that obtained EU membership in 2004. One-way and two-way error component gravity models are estimated using a data set of unbalanced...

This paper considers the nature and the distribution of trade and FDI effects of a potential enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) to the 10 countries that obtained EU membership in 2004. One-way and two-way error component gravity models are estimated using a data set of unbalanced...

The paper critically considers the endogenous Optimum Currency Areas (or e-OCAs) theory, focussing initially on early studies having identified a relevant link between the creation of a monetary union and an upgrading of trade intensity between member countries, on the one hand, and the increase...

About five decades the Franc CFA-Zone in Western and Central Africa was praised as incarnation of economic and political stability in Africa, backed by France. But free convertibility and fixed parity, guaranteed by the French Treasury, mainly served the interest of a small elite of the...

This paper argues that the inception of the euro itself, with its restrictive monetarist institutional structures, to an area which is in a divergent state, which has recently been widened by a process of divergence, is ample reason for long term investors, and, indeed, post-"euphoric", short...

To convince international financial investors of the high real value of the Euro, the EMU has established rules that must be enforced in both the short and the long run. These rules are explained and the economics behind them criticized in the context of a monetary production economy in which...

The move to monetary union has been criticized by many economists and the weak performance of the euro on the foreign exchange markets between 1999 and 2001 has tended to reinforce these doubts. Yet in many respects the introduction of the euro has been a success, even though the EMU policy...

It is commonplace to link neoclassical economics to 18th- or 19th-century physics and its notion of equilibrium, of a pendulum once disturbed eventually coming to rest. Likewise, an economy subjected to an exogenous shock seeks equilibrium through the stabilizing market forces unleashed by the...

In this paper, we explore the advantages and disadvantages of a monetary union between Mercosur countries in light of the recent European experience. We address the issue both from the perspective of the traditional optimal currency area (OCA) theory as w