Examines the domestic politics of European monetary integration

Europe's monetary union will represent the most profound transformation of the international monetary system since the transition from fixed to flexible exchange rates in the early 1970s. It will compete with the erosion of American dominance and the dramatic increase in capital mobility for the distinction of being the most far-reaching change in the global monetary system since the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) will create in Europe a new monetary actor with an economic size roughly comparable to the United States, ushering in a new era in international monetary relations. Nonetheless, while broad interests coincide, the creation of the monetary union will pose challenges to American, Japanese, and other non-European policymakers. Europe's monetary union could prove to be a difficult partner in international monetary cooperation. Henning recommends that European institutions and policy processes be strengthened, representation of the monetary union in the G-7 be consolidated, and that European, American, and Japanese authorities cooperate to reduce instability during the transition to monetary union.

East Asian countries were notably uninterested in regional monetary integration until the late 1990's, when the Asian financial crisis revealed the fragility of the region's exchange rate arrangements and highlighted the need for a stronger regional financial architecture. Since then, the countries of East Asia have begun taking steps to explore monetary and financial cooperation, establishing such initiatives as regular consultations among finance ministers and central bank governors and the pooling of foreign exchange reserves. In this book Ulrich Volz investigates the prospects for monetary cooperation and integration in East Asia, using state-of-the-art theoretical and empirical tools to analyze the most promising policy options. --

European monetary unification seems to be one of the most important events in international monetary affairs since the breakdown of Bretton Woods. It pos es a major challenge to central banks, governments, and labour unions. It opens up new fields of economic research that are both intriguing and fascinating. European Monetary Union amounts to a switch of regime. Surely the Mundell Fleming model of the open economy does no longer apply to Germany or France. The effects of shocks and policies on output and prices should have changed dramatically in size. Some of them should even work in the opposite direction now. The present book is part of a larger research project on monetary union, see Carlberg (1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003). Some parts of this project were presented at the World Congress of the International Economic Association in Lisbon. Other parts were presented at the Macro Study Group of the German Economic Association, at the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association in Klagenfurt, at the Pass au Workshop on International Economics, at the Halle Workshop on Monetary Economics, and at the Research Seminar on Macroeconomics in Freiburg. Moreover, book reviews were published in the Economic Journal, Kyklos, the Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Economics and Statistics.

Traces the history of European monetary negotiations from the 1960s to the 1990s.

When the European Monetary System (EMS) was created in 1978, economists on both sides of the Atlantic predicted its early failure. Today, EMS is alive and well, continuing to defy conventional economic wisdom. The authors address three major questions about the European Monetary System (EMS): how it came into being, how it works and how it may evolve into a fully-fledged monetary union.

A comprehensive study of the international coordination of economic policy in a monetary union. It carefully discusses the process of policy competition and the structure of policy cooperation. As to policy competition, the focus is on competition between the union central bank, the German government, and the French government. Similarly, as to policy cooperation, the focus is on cooperation between the union central bank, the German government, and the French government. The key questions are: Does the process of policy competition lead to full employment and price stability? Can these targets be achieved through policy cooperation? And is policy cooperation superior to policy competition? Another important issue is monetary competition / monetary cooperation between Europe and America.

Europe’s financial crisis cannot be blamed on the Euro, Harold James contends in this probing exploration of the whys, whens, whos, and what-ifs of European monetary union. The current crisis goes deeper, to a series of problems that were debated but not resolved at the time of the Euro’s invention. Since the 1960s, Europeans had been looking for a way to address two conundrums simultaneously: the dollar’s privileged position in the international monetary system, and Germany’s persistent current account surpluses in Europe. The Euro was created under a politically independent central bank to meet the primary goal of price stability. But while the monetary side of union was clearly conceived, other prerequisites of stability were beyond the reach of technocratic central bankers. Issues such as fiscal rules and Europe-wide banking supervision and regulation were thoroughly discussed during planning in the late 1980s and 1990s, but remained in the hands of member states. That omission proved to be a cause of crisis decades later. Here is an account that helps readers understand the European monetary crisis in depth, by tracing behind-the-scenes negotiations using an array of sources unavailable until now, notably from the European Community’s Committee of Central Bank Governors and the Delors Committee of 1988–89, which set out the plan for how Europe could reach its goal of monetary union. As this foundational study makes clear, it was the constant friction between politicians and technocrats that shaped the Euro. And, Euro or no Euro, this clash will continue into the future.

A single currency--and the necessary prior condition of exchange rate cooperation and the stabilization of exchange rates--has been an elusive goal of many European leaders for more than twenty years. While much of the literature on exchange rate cooperation within the European Union focuses on the integration of national economies as the driving force, Thomas Oatley draws on public choice models to develop an explanation of exchange rate cooperation based on domestic politics. The author then tests hypotheses derived from this model in a detailed consideration of the various efforts to stabilize currencies since the 1970s. Oatley argues that monetary policy has distributional effects and is used by policy makers to achieve domestic policy goals. Thus domestic politics plays an important role in defining the approach leaders take to monetary integration. Oatley suggests that leaders supported the creation of the European Monetary System because governments saw a link to the Bundesbank as a useful instrument to help slow the growth of wages, redistribute income from labor to capital, and achieve domestic stabilization. The later collapse of the System reflected the unwillingness on the part of many leaders to continue to follow the Bundesbank's lead as well as the Bundesbank's own reservations about monetary integration. Given the rising strife in countries such as France over the domestic costs of monetary integration, Oatley's domestic politics explanation will be useful in understanding the continued efforts of European policy makers to work towards an integrated currency. This book should appeal to political scientists and economists interested in international cooperation, the European Union and exchange rate systems. Thomas Oatley is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of North Carolina.