With the advent of the economic and monetary union in the European Union (EU), the economic landscape of the EU will bear a striking resemblance to that of the United States in terms of fundamental attributes such as the freedom of internal movements of individuals, capital, and goods within the...

By establishing free trade for industrial products in 12 years, the European Union’s Association Agreements with countries in the Mediterranean region seek to promote accelerated economic growth. This paper reviews the literature and evaluates the economic benefits and costs for Tunisia,...

This paper looks at theoretical and empirical issues associated with the operation of fiscal stabilizers within an economy. It argues that such stabilizers operate most effectively at a national, rather than local, level. As differing cycles across regions tend to offset each other for the...

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has a number of institutional implications for the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe and selected Mediterranean countries that aspire to join the European Union (EU). After describing the current institutional framework for their relations with...

The current destination of Central and Eastern European countries—explicitly for some, implicitly for all—is Brussels. The concept of the distance from Brussels is multi-dimensional. One simple measure, not without theoretical and empirical justification, is physical distance. This paper’s...

Forward-looking behavior on the part of the monetary authority leads least squares estimates to understate the true growth consequences of monetary policy interventions. We present instrumental variables estimates of the impact of interest rates on real output growth for several European...

This paper examines the effects of intensified international competition on industry profits in six European Union (EU) countries. The paper uses two methods to estimate industry profits. The traditional method uses accounting data to obtain a measure of gross price-average cost margins. The...

We present a model of a “soft” exchange rate target zone and interpret it as a stylized description of the post-August 1993 ERM. Our central bank targets a moving average of the current and past exchange rates, rather than the exchange rate’s current level, thus allowing the rate to move...

This paper uses a three-country, three-good, factor-specific model of trade with wage rigidities to investigate how European Monetary Union (EMU) is likely to affect exchange rate variability. Focusing on international macroeconomic adjustment under both exogenous and optimizing monetary...

This paper discusses the challenges that European Monetary Union (EMU) poses for European labor markets, emphasizing in particular the regional dimension of the European unemployment problem. The authors argue that the inability of labor markets to adjust to shocks is largely a regional problem...