Inflation differentials within European Monetary Union (EMU) are increasingly seen as exerting adverse effects on the price competitiveness of member countries’ firms and given the common monetary policy within EMU as being detrimental to euro-area economies, in particular to those with...

Inflation differentials in the Euro area are mainly due to a sustained divergence of wage developments across the Euro area, and narrower differences in labour productivity growth (Alvarez et al., 2006). We investigate convergence of inflation using unit labour cost (ULC) growth and applying...

This paper examines whether macroeconomic convergence is an automatic outcome of forming a currency union by combining an analysis of real interest parity (RIP) in the EU with the argument for the endogeneity of the Optimum Currency Area (OCA) criteria. Using the DF-GLS and the CIPS* panel unit...