This book – written by leading academics and practitioners in the field – brings together cutting edge research on exchange rate regime and monetary union issues. There is a particular focus on the implications for member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council which is itself...

What macroeconomic requirements must Turkey meet in its quest to accede to the European Union? This book, with its distinguished contributors – well-known economists and policymakers – examines and analyses these macroeconomic challenges confronting Turkey. Although the focus is on...

The nature of fiscal policies was changed dramatically by the creation of the Eurozone. While prior to the start of the Eurozone, national governments were sovereign in that they could back up the issue of debt by the issue of money, they lost this sovereignty in the Eurozone. This had dramatic...

In this paper we provide empirical evidence documenting the nature of the Eurozone’s fragility. We find that during periods of turmoil, financial markets have tended to impose strong programs of austerity on member countries of the Eurozone. This confirms the evidence we found in a previous...

In this paper we compare the interregional and international degree of real exchange rate variability of a number of EMS-countries. This allows us to gain insights into the costs of a monetary union. Our major conclusion is that a monetary union among all EMS members would be costly for some of...

We analyse the similarities and the differences in the fragility of the European Monetary System (EMS) and the Eurozone. We test the hypothesis that in the EMS, the fragility arose from the absence of a credible lender of last resort in the foreign exchange markets; whereas in the Eurozone, it...

The IMF classifications of the Central and Eastern European exchange rate arrangements are heterogeneous. While one group of countries reports tight pegs to the euro, a second group seems to have moved toward (more) exchange rate flexibility. Based on the recent discussion about the accuracy of...

In this paper we analyze the effectiveness of sterilized interventions in the foreign exchange market. We use a model in which chartists and fundamentalists interact. This model produces speculative noise which leads to systematic deviations of the exchange rate from its fundamentals. In such an...

Multinational corporations are increasingly seen as excessively big and powerful, and as having dramatically increased in size and power. This perception has led to the view that the big corporations are threatening democratic institutions of the nation-states and that they pervert the cultural...