The failure of the Maastricht criteria delayed Estonia’s accession to the European Monetary Union (EMU) until January 2011. During this time, trading shares with Eurozone countries declined, raising questions about the optimal accession time. In this study, the macroeconomic effects of...

Although entering a currency union involves both costs and benefits, an increasing body of research is finding that the benefits – in terms of international trade creation – are remarkably large. For example, Rose (2000) suggests that countries can up to triple their trade by joining a...

The cross-country regression relating the relative price level to the relative GDP level is significant and stable. But there is no shorter-term trade-off between fast real convergence and low inflation. Such a tradeoff characterises the dynamic process moving the economy along the regression...

The present study sheds light on important aspects of monetary integration in the European Union involving the newest member states. It assesses the degree to which they satisfy the business cycle correlation criteria.Our results demonstrate that there is a common business cycle in the Euro area...

The failure of the Maastricht criteria delayed Estonia's accession to the European Monetary Union (EMU) until January 2011. During this time, trading shares with Eurozone countries declined, raising questions about the optimal accession time. In this study, the macroeconomic effects of...

We propose using a simple Taylor rule to evaluate business cycle convergence of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland with the Eurozone. Our findings indicate an ongoing convergence of those CEE countries to the Eurozone, but with instabilities and heterogeneity between the countries....

This note looks at the correlation of short-term business cycles in the euro area and the EU accession countries. The issue is assessed with the help of vector autoregressive models. There are clear differences in the degree of correlation between accession countries. For Hungary and Slovenia,...

Candidate countries of central and eastern Europe (CEECs) are suppose to join the EU in 2004, June, which imply that they will face important challenges in the conduct of macroeconomic policy, in order to be able to enter the ERM-II system and eventually enter the EMU (European Monetary Union)....

In diesem Beitrag folgen wir der aktuellen Diskussion über die Aussagekraft der Maastricht-Kriterien für die Auswahl von Ländern zur Teilnahme an der EWU. Es wird gezeigt, daß diese Kriterien weder die Theorie optimaler Währungsgebiete ausreichend reflektieren noch der...

In diesem Beitrag folgen wir der aktuellen Diskussion über die Aussagekraft der Maastricht-Kriterien für die Auswahl von Ländern zur Teilnahme an der EWU. Es wird gezeigt, daß diese Kriterien weder die Theorie optimaler Währungsgebiete ausreichend reflektieren noch der...