This note looks at the correlation of short-term business cycles in the euro area and the EU accession countries. The issue is assessed with the help of vector autoregressive models. There are clear differences in the degree of correlation between accession countries. For Hungary and Slovenia,...

There are potential gains for most countries joining the planned EMU. It is argued that these gains are not primarily due to the creation of a currency area but, they depend on the high degree of political independence a European central bank can obtain. The transition path to the EMU with its...

This paper develops an analytical model to evaluate the costs and benefits of a single currency area within a unified framework, inspired by the separate arguments of Mundell (1961) and (1973). The more familiar argument is that, in the presence of country-specific shocks, a single currency area...

PlThis paper deals with the fuzzy clustering modelling of the EMU enlargement process and envisages to determine the relative positioning of the candidates to the Euro adoption. Methodology includes construction of the fuzzy algorithm and simulations using as input-data the values of the...

The introduction of a common currency in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has been the subject of extensive research over the past couple of decades, with extant issues ranging from viability and feasibility to sustainability of monetary integration in the region. This...

On February 24-25, 2006 an international workshop on “Regional and International Currency Arrangements” was held in Vienna. It was co-sponsored by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and the Bank of Greece, and jointly organized by Eduard Hochreiter and George Tavlas. Academic economists and...

In this paper, a short survey is given on the contents and some problems of the theory of optimal currency areas. In addition, a new criterion for the assessment of the optimality of a currency area is proposed: the ability of member states of a monetary union to adjust their economic system to...

In diesem Beitrag wird neben einem kurzen Überblick über die Argumentationsweise und Probleme der Theorie optimaler Währungsräume ein neues Beurteilungskriterium vorgestellt: die politische Reformfähigkeit potentieller Mitgliedstaaten einer Währungsunion. Hintergrund für diese Erweiterung...

The relationship between private and public money has shaped the economic and legal debate over money for centuries. Private money can either compete with or complement public money and this depends on the applicable law and the relative powers of the State and private parties. The rise of...

Does a monetary union need fiscal shock absorbers helping the participating countries to cope with asymmetric shocks? The consensus in the debate over EMU argues that the answer is yes. In this paper, we revisit the issue, building on a dynamic, general equilibrium framework of regions in a...