The second article, reprinted from the Wall Street Journal/Europe, suggests a compromise between a centralized and decentralized structure for the union.

Global trade and payments data, although absolutely essential to an understanding of the pattern and direction of world commerce, are not completely unambiguous. Compilers of such data face numerous problems of definition and measurement of particular components of nations’ aggregate external...

The first article examines the history and theory of monetary unions to ask what factors will foster a stable European Monetary Union. It concludes that a decentralized arrangement of national central banks may undermine the EMU’s durability.