This essay deals with the EMS experience and its failure, with the Maastricht Treaty, and with the interregnum leading to the formation of the EMU in 1999. The paper highlights the position of German authorities, showing that they were quite lucid about the fundamental weaknesses inherent in a...

Very few studies investigated central banking efficiency. Although Data Envelopment Analysis is widely used to measure efficiency within the banking industry, it has surprisingly never been implemented in a central banking context. In our study, we employ a radial DEA model to measure Eurosystem...

We propose a novel metric to evaluate price developments within the euro area (EA), which involves the decomposition of the overall variability of cross country inflation rates into common and idiosyncratic labor cost and markup components. The analysis yields several interesting results. First,...

Approaching the issue of mounting global imbalances from the perspective of the quot;Bretton Woods II hypothesis,quot; this paper argues that the popular preoccupation with China's supposed export-led development strategy is misplaced. It also suggests, similar to Japan's depression, subdued...

We study the price convergence of goods and services in the euro area in 2001-2002. To measure the degree of convergence, we compare the prices of around 220 items in 32 European cities. The width of the border is the price difference attributed to the fact that the two cities are in different...

This paper quantifies the economic influence that shocks to EMU cohesion, which in turn reflect the incomplete nature of the monetary union, have on the rest of the world. Disentangling euro area stress shocks and global risk aversion shocks based on a combination of sign, magnitude and...

Though inflation rates in EMS countries have significantly converged over the past decade, exchange-rate adjusted price levels have sharply diverged and continue to do so, albeit at a decreasing rate. This violation of purchasing power parity (PPP) may be viewed as a stylised fact in...

We develop multivariate measures of synchronicity and co-movement of business cycles. In addition to synchronicity, the co-movement measure takes differences between cycle amplitudes into account that have been overlooked in most previous studies. We apply the new measures to the euro area....

This policy paper underscores the importance of credible currency regimes and their macroeconomic underpinnings for stability in financial systems and long-term economic convergence of developing and emerging market economies. It suggests that for developing regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa,...