The prevalent reinterpretations of the Great Inflation formulated in recent periods attribute the inflationist acceleration of the 1970s mainly to the fact that policymakers at the time based themselves on ‘mistaken’ economic ideas, above all the traditional Phillips curve. However, the...

The lack of cooperation between central banks is the most widely accepted interpretation of the collapse of the gold-exchange standard. This explanation does not take account of the evolution of systems of payment: national commodity moneys were progressively replaced by fiduciary money. These...

The Bretton Woods Agreement once again enabled states to use an international money. The traditional interpretations of this Agreement emphasize the extreme discontinuity between the period after the Second World War and the interwar period. Some interpretations insist on the fact that after the...

The stumbling-bloc argument asserts that regionalism hinders MFN tariff cutting. If this was of first-order importance over previous decades, we should detect this in the levels of the tariffs. Using tariff line data for 23 large trading nations we find that MFN and PTA tariffs are complements,...

This paper explores the growth implications of regional integration. From the theory, it identifies the ‘footprints’ that such growth should leave in the data. It then checks the data on the four poor EU nations for such footprints. Prima facie evidence for Ireland, Portugal and Spain...