The rise of regional monetary arrangements poses a challenge for the International Monetary Fund (IMF)'s global surveillance efforts. This paper reviews how the IMF has responded to earlier regional initiatives, from the European Payments Union of the 1950s and the Gold Pool of the 1960s to the...

The paper reviews the experience of regional economic cooperation in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Conceived as a regional security alliance, the GCC has evolved to become a common market in the making. All six GCC countries participate in the common market project, and additional...

The Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralisation (CMIM) and the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO), established in March 2010 and May 2011, respectively, have made substantial headway. But despite the rapid progress, a series of fundamental questions have been raised, particularly about...

The debt crisis in several member states of the euro area has raised doubts on the viability of European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the future of the euro. While the launch of the euro in 1999 stirred a lot of interest in regional monetary integration and even monetary unification in...

The most recent wave of political integration in Europe is usually interpreted to represent a consequence of German unification, following which the other EU countries attempted to contain an imputed threat of the change in the European balance of power. This paper shows that German unification...

"Since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, a popular view among academic economists and policymakers is that developing countries with open capital accounts have only two options in their exchange rate regimes: either float the exchange rate freely or fix it hard. Within a fixed exchange rate...

"This paper surveys the growing literature on monetary cooperation in East Asia that goes beyond the Chiang Mai Initiative. It compares and contrasts the various proposals for cooperation such as the Williamson basket peg, the Asian monetary system, and the yen block as to their crisis...

Die Wirtschaft Ostdeutschlands erlebte nach der Währungs-, Wirtschafts- und Sozialunion einen Anpassungsschock, der ohne Transferzahlungen aus dem Westen nicht zu überwinden gewesen wäre. Der Fonds Deutsche Einheit, der ursprünglich auf ein Volumen von 115 Mrd. DM konzipiert war, mußte...