The future membership of CEECs in the eurozone involves the risk of external asymmetric shocks, due to too strong a dependence on one sector or one customer country. By defining two indicators - sector-based and geographic - of exposure to shocks, taking into account the symmetry of the export...

In the context of the low levels of regional cooperation among South Asian countries when compared with the successful results from cooperation in East Asia (consisting of South East and East Asian countries), the objective of this paper is first to assess the prospects of cooperation among...

The debate on EMU has been very influenced by the traditional theory of optimum currency areas (OCAs). The paper shows that this theory is not an ideal yardstick for an assessment of EMU. Its assumptions are not very realistic and its focus on asymmetric real shocks is much too narrow. In...

This paper examines whether European monetary union has lowered the degree of price dispersion among member countries. The difference-in-differences methodology is applied to four independent data sets containing prices of identical goods. While the results reported in the paper vary somewhat...

Data from Okinawa's monetary union with the United States in 1958 and with Japan in 1972 are used to obtain a quantitative indication of how monetary union might affect the behavior of nominal and real shocks across two economies. With monetary union, the variance of the real exchange rate...

L'article traite de l'adhesion du Royaume-Uni a l'UEM. L'analyse de la Zone de monnaie optimale (ZMO) ne fournit que de faibles arguments en faveur de l'adhesion, car le Royaume-Uni est situe dans la peripherie et non dans le noyau de l'UEM. Cependant, les couts possibles de l'isolement (risques...

This paper applies theories and methods from modern economics and finance to new sets of historical financial data in order to study the integration and efficiency of the Scandinavian foreign exchange market. Series of the monthly prices of sight sterling bills have been collected and subjected...

The reduction of Greek sovereign debt by €106 billion, agreed in the second bailout package of February 2012, is the largest in history. Nevertheless, immediately after publishing the key terms of the package, doubts arose whether it would achieve its goals: to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio to...

The impact of exchange rate regimes on domestic and foreign investment in the presence of a short-run Phillips curve is investigated. Producers may diversify internationally to increase the flexibility of production, thereby diversifying country-specific productivity and monetary shocks....

The EMU governance has showed to be incapable of an effective crisis management following the global downturn. The recent decisions by European Council taken in March 2011, named the ‘Pact of the Euro’, to design a new governance of the EMU can be considered a significant attempt to give new...