The European Union’s (EU) financial stability framework is being markedly strengthened. This is taking place on the heels of a severe financial crisis owing to weaknesses in the banking system interrelated with sovereign difficulties in the euro area periphery. Important progress has been made...

The World Economic Outlook, published twice a year in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, presents IMF staf economists' analyses of global economic developments during the near and medium tem. Chapters give an overview of the world economy; consider issues affecting industrial countries,...

The likely enlargement of euro-area membership will radically change the environment under which monetary policy will be made in the euro area. Within less than a decade, the number of member countries in the euro area could more than double, with the vast majority of accession countries being...

The paper reviews the stability of long-run money demand in the euro area in the light of recent revisions to M3 data. The analysis confirms the existence of a stable long-run money demand, although the estimated equation implies a smaller equilibrium M3 growth than the European Central Bank''s...

Assessing the magnitude of the output gap is critical to achieving an optimal policy mix. Unfortunately, the gap is an unobservable variable, which, in practice, has been estimated in a variety of ways, depending on the preferences of the modeler. This model selection problem leads to a...

It is widely argued that Europe''s unified monetary policy calls for international coordination at the fiscal level. We survey the issues involved in such coordination in the perspective of macroeconomic stabilization. A simple model identifies the circumstances under which coordination may be...

Recent studies conclude that the ongoing global financial integration may have had little or no value in advancing economic growth, especially in poor countries. Capital is often found to flow ""uphill"" from poor to rich countries. And, when it does flow into the less developed economies, it is...

This study identifies differences in the monetary policy transmission mechanism across the countries in the euro area. It is argued that part of the differences in the response of economic activity to monetary policy during the pre-EMU period, found in other studies, reflected differences in...

This paper analyzes the structural implications of EMU for international capital markets. It discusses the potential size of euro capital markets and the existing roles of European currencies in international capital markets. The paper also examines the euro’s impact on international...

With the advent of the economic and monetary union in the European Union (EU), the economic landscape of the EU will bear a striking resemblance to that of the United States in terms of fundamental attributes such as the freedom of internal movements of individuals, capital, and goods within the...