Sooner or later all the accession economies will have to join the ERM2 - a mandatory framework for all those countries that face the challenge of joining the EU. Entering the eurozone will be an unprecedented achievement. The achievement will be all the more remarkable given the unique...

The periodically returning debates and the disappointing bargaining on the financial perspectives for 2007-2013 have led to the proposal of a comprehensive review of the EU budget in 2008/2009. This provides an opportunity for initiating fundamental reforms of the revenue side of the EU budget....

For the case of Switzerland, this paper endeavours to estimate the empirical extend with which exchange rates are "passed-through" onto import prices. For data covering the 1999 to 2010 period, the results suggest that (i) on aggregate, the exchange rate pass-through is highly incomplete with an...

Consumer prices are not very responsive to movements in nominal exchange rates and their response has fallen in Canada since the mid 1980s. This paper explores two of the most likely explanations for this decline in exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices: (1) lower inflation and (2)...

China keeps its exchange rate tightly fixed to the dollar. Its productivity growth and trade surplus have been high, and it continues to accumulate large dollar reserves. Many observers take this as evidence that the renminbi is undervalued and should be appreciated to reduce the Chinese trade...

We argue that criticism concerning the Chinese dollar peg is misplaced as no predictable link exists between the exchange rate and the trade balance of an international creditor economy. The stable nominal yuan/dollar rate is argued to have stabilized Chinese, East Asian and global growth....

We present a new approach to study empirically the effect of the introduction of the euro on currency invoicing. Our approach uses a compositional multinomial logit model, in which currency choice depends on the characteristics of both the currency and the country. We use unique quarterly panel...

In this paper, we analyse effects of EU integration on Asian countries. Since the early 1990s, it is especially the trade creation effect of monetary integration (so-called Rose effect) which is heavily debated in the literature. Recent papers seem to indicate that the Rose effect seems to be...

This study examines the effects of bilateral exchange rate on trade flows in the WAMZ and assesses the role of complementarity trade structures in enhancing intra-WAMZ trade. The modified gravity model is used to assess whether efforts by WAMZ countries to facilitate transactions in national...

Two seemingly unconnected empirical results suggest an intriguing mechanism. First, economic integration helps harmonize prices internationally, with trade being the primary channel (Rogoff 1996, Goldberg and Knetter 1997). Second, monetary union may greatly increase the amount of trade among...