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"Currency Union"
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Currency Unions in Prospect and Retrospect
We critically review the recent literature on currency unions and discuss the methodological challenges posed by the empirical assessment of their costs and benefits. In the process, we provide evidence on the economic effects of the euro. In particular, and in contrast with estimates of the trade effect of other currency unions, we find that the euro's impact on trade has been close to zero. After reviewing the costs and benefits of joining a currency union, we conclude with some open questions on normative and positive aspects of the theory of currency unions, emphasizing the need for a unified welfare-based framework to weigh their costs and gains.
Journal Article
The crisis behind the Eurocrisis : the Eurocrisis as a multidimensional systemic crisis of the EU
The Crisis behind the Euro-Crisis encourages dialogue among scholars across the social sciences in an attempt to challenge the narrative that regarded the Euro-crisis as an exceptional event. It is suggested instead that the Euro-crisis, along with the subsequent crises the EU has come to face, was merely symptomatic of deeper systemic cracks. This book's aim is to uncover that hidden systemic crisis - the 'crisis behind the Euro-crisis'. Under this reading it emerges that what needs to be questioned is not only the allegedly purely economic character of the Euro-crisis, but, more fundamentally, its very classification as an 'emergency'. Instead, the Euro-crisis needs to be regarded as expressive of a chronic, dysfunctional, but 'normal' condition of the EU. By following this line of analysis, this book illuminates not only the causes of contemporary turbulences in the European project, but perhaps the 'true' nature of the EU itself.
Book
National Money as a Barrier to International Trade: The Real Case for Currency Union
Europeans are proceeding with EMU; a number of countries in the Americas are pursuing dollarization. Conventional wisdom as to why is that the costs are high, since members of currency unions cannot employ domestic monetary policy to smooth business cycles. More intriguingly, most economists think that the economic benefits from currency union are low. It is argued that conventional wisdom may be wrong, since national money seems to be a significant barrier to international trade in the data. Currency unions lower these monetary barriers to trade and are thus associated with higher trade and welfare; it is estimated that the EMU will cause European trade to rise by over 50%. The benefits of trade created by currency union may swamp any costs of forgoing independent monetary policy.
Journal Article
Alternative interpretations of a stateless currency crisis
A number of economists warned that a political union was a prerequisite for a viable currency union. This paper disputes the feasibility of such a political union. A fully fledged federal union, which would likely please peripheral Europe, is impracticable since it implies a degree of fiscal solidarity that does not exist. A Hayekian minimal federal state, which would appeal to core Europe, would be refused by peripheral members, since residual fiscal sovereignty would be surrendered without any clear positive economic and social return. Even an intermediate solution based on coordinated Keynesian policies would be unfeasible, since it would be at odds with German 'monetary mercantilism'. The euro area is thus trapped between equally unfeasible political perspectives. In this bleak context, austerity policies are mainly explained by the necessity to readdress the euro area balance-of-payments crisis. This crisis presents striking similarities to traditional financial crises in emerging economies associated with fixed exchange regimes. Therefore, the delayed response of the European Central Bank (ECB) to the sovereign debt crisis cannot be seen as the culprit of the euro area crisis. The ECB's monetary refinancing mechanisms, Target 2 and the ECB's belated Outright Monetary Transactions intervention impeded a blow-up of the currency union, but could not solve its deep causes. The current combination of austerity policies and moderate ECB intervention aims to rebalance intra-eurozone foreign accounts and to force competitive deflation strategy.
Journal Article
OPTIMAL MONETARY AND FISCAL POLICY IN A CURRENCY UNION WITH FRICTIONAL GOODS MARKETS
We develop an open economy model of a currency union with frictional goods markets and endogenous search decisions to study optimal monetary and fiscal policy. Households finance consumption with a common currency and can search for locally produced goods across regions that differ in their market characteristics. Equilibrium is generically inefficient due to regional spillovers from endogenous search decisions. While monetary policy alone cannot correct this distortion, fiscal policy can help improve allocations by taxing or subsidizing production at the regional level. When households of only one region can search, optimal policy entails a deviation from the Friedman rule and a production subsidy (tax) if there is underinvestment (overinvestment) in search decisions. Optimal policy when households from both region search requires the Friedman rule and zero production taxes in both regions.
Journal Article
Does the composition of government expenditure matter for Eastern Caribbean economies’ long-run sectoral output growth?
PurposeThis study takes a disaggregated approach to investigate the impacts of long-run GDP on changes in total government expenditure in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) economies. An understanding of the relationship between changes in total government expenditure and GDP (by sector categories) is expected to provide a working tool to understand the growth debt nexus of Caribbean countries. The purpose of the paper is to use an auto regressive distributed lag (ARDL) and error correction model (ECM) to examine and analyse short- and long-run dynamics of disaggregated approach to both output and government expenditure in a dynamic model to identify the growth in the Eastern Caribbean Countries.Design/methodology/approachIn an attempt to examine the long-run dynamics, data for the period 1970-2015 were used in an ARDL and ECM framework. The authors examine the long-run GDP impacts of changes in total government expenditure and in the shares of different spending categories for the ECCU countries to establish and analyse short and long-run dynamics.FindingsThe results suggest that total fiscal expenditure and disaggregated expenditure including debt services have both positively and negatively contributed to economic growth in the agriculture, manufacturing and mining sectors. Among others, the study found that high national debt in the region resulted primarily from increases in government expenses and diminishing income sources.Originality/valueThis paper is the first to take a disaggregated approach to investigate the relationship between economic growth and government expenditure in the Eastern Caribbean States. The authors’ empirical results suggest that debt servicing reduces economic growth both in the short and long run. The greatest impact being felt in the mining and manufacturing sectors, namely, 1 per cent increase in debt service will bring about 7.90 and 1.67 per cent decrease in economic growth. These results offer fairly strong support to the view that expenditure share variables can weaken sectoral growth, and hence force the overall growth to decline.
Journal Article
Country Size, Currency Unions, and International Asset Returns
Differences in real interest rates across developed economies are puzzlingly large and persistent. I propose a simple explanation: bonds issued in the currencies of larger economies are expensive because they insure against shocks that affect a larger fraction of the world economy. I show that, indeed, differences in the size of economies explain a large fraction of the cross-sectional variation in currency returns. The data also support additional implications of the model: the introduction of a currency union lowers interest rates in participating countries, and stocks in the nontraded sector of larger economies pay lower expected returns.
Journal Article
The effect of currency unions on business cycle correlations: the EMU case
This paper examines empirically the effects of the introduction of the euro on the output correlation among the member economies. The similarity of shocks affecting the members is an important condition to minimize the costs from the loss of national monetary policy implementation. Eichengreen (Economic Policy 10:118–187;
1990
) pointed that this is an important condition to be satisfied before joining a currency union. Frankel and Rose (Economic J 108:1009–1025
1998
) state that membership could lead to an ex post rise in output correlations. In the current study, we employ ex post and ex ante data on output for 11 members and 11 non-members of the EMU and we test whether the adoption of the euro increased the output synchronization among members compared to non-members. The main findings of this paper are that there is not robust evidence for a decrease in average correlation among members compared to the co-movement among non-members. Our sensitivity analysis reveals that for a group of countries considered to be the core of the European Union, the effect is statistically insignificant. Any decrease in correlation could be attributed to some extend to the countries of the periphery, and also to some of the countries considered as members of the core, giving credit to Eichengreen (Economic Policy 10:118–187;
1990
) and Krugman (
1990
) arguments about increased specialization giving rise to idiosyncratic shocks.
Journal Article