Turmoil in euro area once more forces EU authorities to rethink future of further monetary integration. One of the most commonly used criterions for successful monetary in contemporary research is business cycle synchronization (BCS). Though BCS has been vastly described at country level, not as...

We analyze the role of fiscal policy and intra-European trade in business cycle synchronization in the EU for the period 1995-2008. There is a broad consensus that the relationship between fiscal policy and business cycle comovements and between trade integration and cyclical synchronization are...

Since the 1970s the characteristics of international business cycles have changed and deeper economic integration has modified the features of cross-country comovement. We formally test for correlation shifts in measures of real economic activity and economic/financial integration. In Europe we...

Studies often conclude that the proposed Southern African Development Community monetary union would be disastrous and not optimal for all member countries. This is because of the observed low, and sometimes negative business cycle correlation amongst member countries. However, it has been...

On-going debate of a Pacific Islands currency union has rekindled the argument on whether Pacific Island Countries (PICs) demonstrate symmetric behavior in their business cycles as a precondition for a union according to the OCA theory. Unfortunately for the PICs, there are no empirical studies...

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,...

The Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CAEMC) has been a monetary union for several decades now. According to the hypothesis of endogenous optimal currency areas (OCAs), the degree of business cycle synchronisation across its member states should be significantly higher today than...

As trade integration deepens in East Asia, it is expected that there will be closer links in business cycles among East Asian countries. Theoretically, however, increased trade can lead business cycles across trading partners to shift in either direction: while inter-industry trade resulting in...

We examine economic convergence among euro area countries on multiple dimensions. While there was nominal convergence of inflation and interest rates, real convergence of per capita income levels has not occurred among the original euro area members since the advent of the common currency....

Unilateral euroization is underexplored even in comparison to unilateral dollarization (taken to mean the adoption of the US dollar as legal tender). This paper attempts to partly fill this gap in the literature by investigating the case of Montenegro, which is one of the two countries that have...