An extensive literature praises economic integration and monetary unions as powerful means for economic convergence between, and the growth of, nations. Several potential factors have been flagged for successful economic convergence, such as labor availability and mobility and the role of...

In the years leading to EMU, the Portuguese economy experienced robust growth, lower inflation and reduced budget deficits, allowing the country to meet the Maastricht criteria and participate in EMU. A few years after the adoption of the euro, this scenario changed and the apparent success...

This chapter explores an institutional challenge still facing the European Monetary Union (EMU) after the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis. One of these is the absence of a centralized macroeconomic stabilization function to deal with possible asymmetrical shocks, in addition to the common...