STABILIZATION POLICY WITHIN A CURRENCY AREA

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

In the wake of monetary integration in Europe, Austria abandoned the tested hard currency policy (HCP) for joining EMU as a member. The final target of monetary policy and real sector adjustment needs are similar in both regimes, and the HCP may therefore be viewed as a convenient "training camp" for later EMU accession. Georg Winckler devoted a number of essays on the critique, but also on the analytical foundation, of the HCP. The current paper takes up some of the strands developed by him, and reviews the implications on Austria's monetary strategy of the changeover to EMU. At EMU level it was required to newly establish credibility and accountability of the monetary authorities. Towards this end, the ECB emitted harsh signals to be committed to its primary task of maintaining price stability, and it was therefore held accountable for neglecting real sector developments as well as potential threats of deflation. This is unjustified, given the circumstances the ECB has been faced with since its inception, including the marked swings in the dollar value of the euro. The ECB could be blamed, however, for the lack of transparency with regard to its monetary strategy (which it declines to be "inflation targeting"): it resorts to a rather vaguely defined final monetary target, it does not observe an intermediate target, and it is by no means clear what purpose the reference value for money growth does serve. The paper concludes that in Europe there is no immediate danger that the goal of price stability could unintentionally end up in deflation.

2010

In this paper, the rising divergence in sectoral wage moderation within European Monetary Union (EMU) member states since the introduction of the Euro is examined. During the 1980s and 1990s, wage restraint cycles between exposed, manufacturing sectors, and sheltered, ...

Monetary Policy, Fiscal Policy and Labour Markets, CUP

EMU and the …, 1997

Economic Papers, 2008

In May 2008, it was ten years since the final decision to move to the third and final stage of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), and the decision on which countries would be the first to introduce the euro. To mark this anniversary, the Commission is undertaking a strategic review of EMU. This paper constitutes part of the research that was either conducted or financed by the Commission as source material for the review. Economic Papers are written by the Staff of the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs, or by experts working in association with them. The Papers are intended to increase awareness of the technical work being done by staff and to seek comments and suggestions for further analysis. The views expressed are the author's alone and do not necessarily correspond to those of the European Commission. Comments and enquiries should be addressed to:

Open Economies Review, 2010

We extend irrelevance results of sticky prices and fixed exchange rates to environments with sticky wages. Provided payroll taxes can be used with the same flexibility as monetary policy, then sticky wages are irrelevant for both optimal allocations and policies in response to shocks. This is the case also under fixed exchange rates or in a monetary union.

In recent years, the viability of the eurozone as a currency union has been called into question, at least partly on the grounds that the use of a common currency throughout Europe leads to real exchange rates that are more misaligned than would occur under freely floating exchange rates. Many of the arguments refer back to the case for flexible exchange rates in Friedman (1953), based on the notion that nominal exchange rate flexibility will allow for efficient adjustment in terms of trade even when nominal goods prices are sticky. While there are many dimensions to the optimum currency area question, space considerations allow us to focus only on the question of whether countries in a currency union, and specifically the eurozone, have worse outcomes for real exchange rates than if they were to adopt freely floating exchange rates.

2007

1995

There is a large and growing literature on the benefits and costs of moving to a single currency in Europe. Much of the literature is theoretical in nature with very little empirical evaluation of the magnitudes of effects. This paper places some quantitative magnitudes on the scale of some issues in European monetary integration. It uses the European version of the MSG2 multicountry model to evaluate the variance of a number of European variables in the face of shocks to money markets, fiscal policy and total factor productivity, under three alternative European monetary regimes: the current European monetary system; a European monetary Union with a European central bank setting monetary policy; and a system of floating exchange rates within Europe. For each type of shock we consider the adjustment to global shocks, European wide shocks, shocks in Germany and shocks in Europe excluding Germany. Within the constraints of each monetary regime we allow any unconstrained monetary instruments to be set either cooperatively between European countries or non-cooperatively where each country is allowed to set their policy instruments to maximize an objective function. We find that no monetary regime consistently dominates for all shocks and regimes are ranked differently across European economies for the same shock. Abstracting from the serious question of policy credibility, this suggests that maintaining some flexibility in the setting of monetary policy in countries could potentially be invaluable to facilitate smooth adjustment to global, regional and country specific shocks.