Recent analyses of the gains to policy coordination have focussed on the strategic aspects of macroeconomic policy making in a static setting. A major theme is that noncooperative policy making is likely to be Pareto inefficient because of the presence of beggar-thy-neighbor policies. This paper...

In this paper we would like to shed some more light on these aspect of European policy coordination both through the use of a simple analytic model and through an empirical evualuation of the potential gains of superior European strategies.

Uncoordinated macroeconomic policies lead to 'beggar thy neighbour' strategies which are clearly suboptimal for the European Community as a whole. Given the high degree of interdependence of their economies, European governments have a clear incentive to export their inflation or their...