Suchergebnisse

This book sheds light on the Soviet economic system, which claimed the eventual abolition of money, collapsed following a monetary turmoil. It argues that the cause of the economic collapse was embedded in the design of the economic system. The Soviet economic system restricted the market, but continued to use fiat money. Consequently, it faced the question for which no feasible answer seemed to exist: how to manage fiat money without data and information generated by the market? Using Soviet data newly available from the archives, the book evaluates the performance of the components of monetary management mechanism, discovers the continuous accumulation of open and secret government debts, and quantitatively analyzes the relationship between economic growth and the money supply to support the argument. The book concludes that the Soviet economic collapse marked the end of the long history of Soviet monetary mismanagement.

This paper studies the international coordination of monetary policies in the world economy. It carefully discusses the process of policy competition and the structure of policy cooperation. As to policy competition, the focus is on monetary competition between Europe and America. Similarly, as to policy cooperation, the focus is on monetary cooperation between Europe and America. The spillover effects of monetary policy are negative. The policy targets are price stability and full employment.

In an economy with large wage‐setters (like industry unions), the monetary regime affects the trade‐off between consumer real wages and employment and profits faced by the wage‐setters. This paper shows that an exchange rate target, including participation in a monetary union, is likely to involve lower wages in the traded sector, and higher wages in the non‐traded sector, than does a price target. An exchange rate target also involves higher prices on non‐traded goods relative to on traded goods. Overall welfare is likely to be higher under a price target.

The economic recession in Europe, triggered by the financial crisis of 2008–2009, has rekindled the debate over whether Europe constitutes a viable single currency area. A key issue concerns the relationship between regional economic cyclicity and monetary union: in the absence of a common automatic fiscal stabilization mechanism and with limited geographical mobility of factors, the greater the asymmetry of shocks across the regions making up a currency area, the more that area departs from an optimal single currency space as far as monetary policy is concerned. Our aim in this article is to investigate whether the regions in the Eurozone have become more or less similar in their vulnerability and resilience to economic shocks since the monetary union. Using predictions based on a spatial panel model with random effects, an endogenous spatial lag and spatially autoregressive errors, we find that a common contractionary shock across the Eurozone has its biggest impact on the most geographically isolated regions, which are precisely those peripheral regions in Euroland that are suffering the most acute sovereign debt crisis, and which are among the lowest productivity regions of the European Union. The implications of these results for the debate over European monetary and fiscal integration are discussed.

I build a quantitative two-country DSGE model of the European Union (EU) and investigate whether there are welfare gains from fiscal policy cooperation between the new EU members and the euro area (EMU). Fiscal cooperation is defined in terms of joint maximization of the weighted average of households' welfare. I find that fiscal policy cooperation is welfare-reducing for both groups of countries. This result depends on a realistic assumption about the presence of foreign ownership of firms in the new EU countries. When there is no foreign ownership in the new EU countries, the euro area is indifferent between cooperating and not cooperating, but the new EU members still prefer not to cooperate with EMU in terms of fiscal policy.

This paper studies the international coordination of monetary policies in the world economy. It carefully discusses the process of policy competition and the structure of policy cooperation. As to policy competition, the focus is on monetary competition between Europe and America. Similarly, as to policy cooperation, the focus is on monetary cooperation between Europe and America. The spillover effects of monetary policy are negative. The policy targets are price stability and full employment.

The African Union seeks to create eight regional economic and monetary communities until 2023, which shall ultimately be merged to a continental African Economic and Monetary Union until 2034. As the economic rationale for creating a single market for goods, services and labor seem straightforward; making a compelling case for a single currency is much harder. This dissertation empirically assesses how Africa and its regions meet the criteria for optimum currency areas and concludes that Africa should abandon its plans of monetary unification for the foreseeable future.