In this speech, the Governor notes that monetary union is fundamentally a political rather than an economic issue, and that the politics of monetary union is for elected politicians. But it is also an economic issue: he goes on to survey the pros and cons of the single currency in the context of...

The former EU president Jean-Claude Junker has proposed that all countries of the European Union should also adopt the euro as their currency and recent research has shown that countries currently pursuing this goal indeed fulfill the classical Optimal Currency Area (OCA) criterion of positively...

The former EU president Jean-Claude Junker has proposed that all countries of the European Union should also adopt the euro as their currency and recent research has shown that countries currently pursuing this goal indeed fulfill the classical Optimal Currency Area (OCA) criterion of positively...

The aim of this paper is to investigate business cycle synchronization between seven candidate countries to the Euro Area (EA) - Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Sweden - and the Euro Area (EA-12/EA-19), France and Germany. The Hodrick-Prescott filter is used to...

We review the literature on business cycle correlation between the euro area and the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs), a topic that has gained attention as the newest EU members approach monetary union. Our meta-analysis of 35 identified publications suggests some CEECs already...