Suchergebnisse

Twenty-five years ago, East Germany adopted the deutschmark as its currency. In terms of East German economic development, monetary union proved to be a disaster. With virtually no warning, East Germany's few productive factories and businesses were exposed to free market competition; industrial production collapsed in a way unparalleled in history. Nevertheless, for political reasons, introducing monetary union at the start of the process of system transformation was almost unavoidable. Given the insecure foreign policy situation, the aim was to seize the chance of reunification and push through monetary union to create an irreversible fait accompli. Moreover, this move was intended to put a brake on the massive exodus of people from East Germany. Admittedly, it also buttressed the widespread illusion among the East German population that a strong currency would facilitate fast-track income parity on West German levels. This illusion, however, also encouraged excessive wage hikes which only served to intensify the shock of alignment in summer 1990, complicate economic renewal in eastern Germany, and increase the financial costs.

Main description: This volume contains the contributions of a conference dealing with the consequences of the European Monetary Union for the macroeconometric modelling of the Euro area, which took place in Essen in 2000. At the end of the conference the participants were convinced that the discussions including a great variety of theoretical, methodical and factual aspects from the producers' as well as the consumers' perspective will not fail to have a certain impact on the future development of macroeconometric modelling in the Euro area.Once more it became clear, however, that an ideal way to a solution of the problems is still not in sight. The future development will be characterized by a plurality of approaches and models. Thus trends continue which have had a more or less strong, durable or temporary influence on the model landscape since the emergence of the monetarist revolution, the "rational expectations" or the "real business cycle"-models. We are still at the beginning of the theoretical and empirical exploration of the macroeconomic development of the Euro area, it is not always clearly perceptible what is transitory and what is permanent, and this openness should facilitate the reception of the experiences and results which have been presented.The idea for this event was developed in the course of the Project LINK. One of the highlights of the conference was the participation of the nobel prize winner Professor Dr. Lawrence Klein - pioneer and Nestor of macroeconometric modelling - who, as his contribution shows, is following up the creation of the European Monetary Union with critical interest

This book studies the coexistence of inflation and unemployment in a monetary union. The focus is on how to reduce the associated loss. The primary target of the European central bank is low inflation in Europe. The primary target of the German government is low unemployment in Germany. And the primary target of the French government is low unemployment in France. The European central bank has a quadratic loss function. The same applies to the German government and the French government. The key questions are: To what extent can the sequential process of monetary and fiscal decisions reduce the loss caused by inflation and unemployment? Is monetary and fiscal cooperation superior to the sequential process of monetary and fiscal decisions?

We use the two-country model of the euro area developed by Quint and Rabanal (2014) to study policymaking in the European Monetary Union (EMU). In particular, we focus on strategic interactions: 1) between monetary policy and a common macroprudential authority, and; 2) between an EMU-level monetary authority and regional macroprudential authorities. In the first case, price stability and financial stability are pursued at the EMU level, while in the second case each macroprudential authority adopts region-specific objectives. We compare cooperative equilibria in the simultaneous-move and leadership solutions, each obtained assuming policy discretion. Further, we assess the effects on policy performance of assigning shared objectives across policymakers and of altering the level of importance attached to various policy objectives.

This book studies the strategic policy interactions in a monetary union. The leading protagonists are the European Central Bank and national governments. The target of the ECB is low inflation in Europe. The targets of a national government are low unemployment and a low structural deficit. There are demand shocks, supply shocks, and mixed shocks. There are country-specific shocks and common shocks. This book develops a series of basic, intermediate, and more advanced models. Here the focus is on the Nash equilibrium. The key questions are: Given a shock, can policy interactions reduce the existing loss? And to what extent can they do so? Another topical issue is policy cooperation. To illustrate all of this there are a lot of numerical examples.

Supranationalist and liberal‐intergovernmentalist theoretical accounts of European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) largely ignore geopolitical factors. This article argues that geopolitical factors are of vital importance for explaining and understanding EMU. It does this by examining the role of such factors at five crucial moments of the EMU process: (1) the launching of EMU in 1988–89; (2) the uncertain year following the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989; (3) the final decisions on EMU taken at the December 1991 Maastricht summit; (4) the ratification and currency crises of 1992–93; and (5) the efforts to implement EMU after the treaty's final ratification in October 1993. A focus on geopolitics, it is argued, fits within a historical‐institutionalist account of European integration.