We present in this article a summary of our work on the relation between country size and growth strategy. We begin by reviewing the major steps in the literature on the economics of country size, focusing on contemporary contributions, from the Robinson volume (1960) to Alesina and Spolaore?s...

The unfolding of the crisis in the Eurozone can be explained by the interaction of institutional features and policy failures, and by their interconnection with real and financial imbalances. The crisis has shown that internal divergence in the EZ is based on important structural components...

The sovereign debt crisis that deepened within the last three years in particular Eurozone countries makes up one of the major components of the current global economic crisis (2006-2011) which were briefly described in Kibritçioğlu (2011). In this follow-up study, the historical and political...

The creation of EMU raises the question whether the common monetary policy has the same impact in all member countries. We analyse the convergence of interest rates in four major EMU countries from 1999 to 2007. We suggest to test the convergence of the interest rates with the full term...

This paper distinguishes four alternative sovereign debt resolution mechanisms: pure market solutions, modified market solutions, crisis lending by the IMF and other institutions, and the proposed Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism (SDRM). It is hard to find--at the general level of...

Whatever its successes and difficulties, monetary integration has caused significant changes in many, perhaps most, Eurozone societies. A review of EMU's origins and first years of EMU would thus be remiss without national case studies. France is a particularly good choice for this task. It has...

This study shows that the origins of the sovereign debt crisis within the euro area are to be found within the private sector and in economic policy mistakes rather than only in the profligacy of some national governments in the Southern periphery of Euroland. Sovereign debtors and their private...

In our analysis, we examine the convergence of all recent ten European Union (EU) members to EU standards. Novel features of the paper include more complete measures of convergence, in particular fiscal convergence; a broader examination of inflation convergence with respect to the Maastricht...

This paper discusses a number of major factors that led to the euro crisis and the failure of officials to deal with it effectively. It is argued that a good deal of these deficiencies in policy can be explained by a combination of faulty mental models, time-inconsistency problems, and cognitive...

At the end of the '80s, Central European countries started to abandon their administratively fixed exchange rates and gradually adopted new monetary regimes with more or less emphasis on the exchange rate, inflation and growth targets. This study analyses the economic background of the choice of...