Emerging markets (sometimes endowed with fertile pampas) have limited access to world capital markets and suffer from original sin: they cannot borrow in their own currency. Does this mean that monetary and exchange rate policy has non-standard effects in such countries? We develop a simple...

Emerging markets (sometimes endowed with fertile pampas) have limited access to world capital markets and suffer from original sin: they cannot borrow in their own currency. Does this mean that monetary and exchange rate policy has non-standard effects in such countries? We develop a simple...

This book deals with the economic consequences of monetary integration, which has long been dominated by the Optimal Currency Area (OCA) paradigm. In this model, money is perceived as having developed from a private sector cost minimization process to facilitate transactions. Not surprisingly,...