There has been a lot of debate lately about the shape of the international currency system. Increasingly, we are told, the world is moving toward a multicurrency system with several poles, implying that the system is becoming more competitive. Polarity, however, is a notoriously crude measure of...

The studies included in these two volumes have been selected to highlight key recent contributions to scholarship on the political economy of international monetary relations. Over the last decade, the central theme of research in this area has been the growth and increasingly pervasive...

This key reference collection focuses on the international monetary system. It includes seminal contributions on issues such as exchange rate systems, recycling, adjustment mechanisms, debtor–creditor relations, international monetary policy coordination and seigniorage. While focusing on the...

Can the euro ever challenge the dollar as an international currency? This article argues that Europe's new money is fated to remain a distant second to America's greenback, for four reasons. First is the persistent inertia of monetary behaviour, which will inhibit any rapid switch to the euro....

For many observers, internationalization is the yuan’s manifest destiny and a by-product of the remarkable economic success of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). But is such confidence warranted? Recent history has seen the emergence of other currencies that were also expected, at least...

The field of international political economy gained prominence in the early 1970s--when the Arab oil embargo and other crises ended the postwar era of virtually unhindered economic growth in the United States and Europe--and today is an essential part of both political science and economics....

A common currency, as envisioned in the Maastricht treaty, is thought to be the surest way to "lock in" commitments to monetary cooperation among sovereign states. But historical evidence suggests otherwise. Comparative analysis of six currency unions demonstrates that while economic and...

This is the second of two anthologies on international political economy drawn from articles published in the journal International Organization. The book is organized into four sections: Trade, Multinational Firms and Globalization, Money and Finance, and Emerging Issues.

After nearly a century of dominance of the international monetary system, has the US dollar finally met its match in the euro? When Europe's economic and monetary union (EMU) came into existence in 1999, many observers predicted that the euro would soon join America's greenback at the peak of...

The global debt problem influences the foreign-policy capabilities of the United States through its impact on the government's “linkage strategies” in foreign affairs. In some circumstances policy makers are forced to make connections between different policy instruments or issues that might...