Not since the Great Depression have monetary policy matters and institutions weighed so heavily in commercial, financial, and political arenas. Apart from the eurozone crisis and global monetary policy issues, for nearly two years all else has counted for little more than noise on a relative...

While the financial protection measures enacted by the ECB and the community of Eurozone members have calmed financial markets, they have left the competitiveness problem of the Eurozone's southern countries and France unresolved. The paper compares price inflation before the crisis with the...

Real exchange and interest rates may still fluctuate inside the EMU and give rise to changes in competitiveness. We find, in contrast to what is generally expected, no convergence in these variables after the introduction of the euro. On the contrary, a divergence is found that is extraordinary...

Dieser Aufsatz untersucht, inwieweit die jüngste Debatte um mögliche Divergenzen in der Eurozone tatsächlich einen Grund zur Besorgnis aufzählt. Dabei wird argumentiert, dass die häufig übliche Definition von Divergenzen als die Veränderung der Standardabweichung bei Inflation und...

This paper was commissioned by DG ECFIN from the EU Commission as part of the "EMU@10" project and is published in Hungarian language by the permission of the EU Commission. The original English language version of the paper is available at:...

The paper discusses the risks and challenges faced by the new members on the road to the euro and the strategies for and timing of euro adoption. We investigate the real-nominal convergence nexus from the perspective of euro area entry. We argue that the initial level of economic development as...

We analyze producer price developments in the transition from a national exchange rate regime to a monetary union. The focus is on the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Stylized facts witness about an exploding gaps in producer-price inflation during the years immediately following the...

A floating exchange rate combined with a clear inflation target can be a powerful stabilizer even if there are fluctuations in exchange rates that are unrelated to current fundamentals. Under plausible conditions, most of the stabilisation will occur through the exchange rate, and fundamental...

Using a New-Keynesian framework, we investigate how far the inflationary processes in member states of EMU cause regional price levels to converge. We fail to produce hard evidence of the present existence of such an adjustment mechanism, notwithstanding that inflation in some countries tends to...