Paper deals with the European Monetary Union from perspective of Post Keynesian school of economic thought. It discusses separately arguments often proposed by mainstream economists. After the brief introduction, which highlights main differences between mainstream and Post Keynesian economic...

In this paper, we set out to examine an efficient fiscal-policy framework for a monetary union. We illustrate that fiscal policy’s bias toward budget deficit only temporarily ceased at the end of the 20th century as European countries endeavored to qualify for euro-zone membership, which...

The European Union (EU) accepted ten new member states (NMS) in 2004. These countries, mostly former socialist countries, have had to adjust their economic policies to the EU’s standards. Perhaps most difficult has proven to be fiscal policy whereby NMS must comply with the Stability and...

In this paper, we track behaviour of fiscal authorities of the ten new EU member states (NSM) in the period which immediately preceded their EU accession. We first present basic stylized facts about public budgets of those countries. The paper then analyses reasons which led to periods of fiscal...

In this paper, we set out to examine an efficient fiscal policy framework for a monetary union. We find that a monetary union can survive with diverging fiscal policies and that the financial markets are efficient enough to separate between “good” and “bad” fiscal policies and punish the...

This paper uses the abolition of children’s doctor-visit co-payments effective since April 2009 as a natural experiment to estimate the effect of those co-payments on the number of doctor visits made by children. As the policy change involved only children, we are able to use the adult part of...

This paper intends to fill two gaps in the Optimal Currency Area literature. First of all, Mundell's original idea has very little formalmodel theoretical underpinning. Second, it almost exclusively views countries contemplating monetary unification as single economies. We question this view and...

In this paper, we set out to examine an efficient fiscal-policy framework for a monetary union. We illustrate that fiscal policy’s bias toward budget deficit only temporarily ceased at the end of the 20th century as European countries endeavored to qualify for euro-zone membership, which...

This paper tracks the behavior of the fiscal authorities of the ten new EU member states in the period that immediately preceded their EU accession in 2004. We analyze the reasons that led to fiscal consolidations in the new members and present evidence from the preaccession economic and...