Policy Coordination In A 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.

The launch of European Monetary Union (EMU) marked the beginning of a new era, and its establishment has proved an impressive success at the technical, legal, and procedural level. After all, EMU has accelerated economic and political integration in the European Union and tied the economies of the Member States closer together. However, the performance of the euro, high unemployment rates, uneven output and investment growth, and the issue of structural reforms that have yet to be tackled have raised questions about the performance of EMU in practice. There is a general consensus on the justification for economic policy coordination. The existing literature on economic policy coordination, however, seems far from able to provide robust conclusions about how to organize the necessary interaction of institutions and policies. Therefore, there seems to be a case for re-examining the subject under the new framework set by EMU. The objective of such a reassessment is to enhance the understanding of what type of coordination and what institutional setting for policy coordination can be expected to be most favorable. Challenges for Economic Policy Coordination within European Monetary Union provides an intellectually stimulating contribution to the ongoing debate.

This is what we’ve all been waiting for – a book that demystifies the European community’s monetary union. Unlike other books, this one provides readers with a practical yet sophisticated grasp of the macroeconomic principles necessary to understand a monetary union. The most important case in point is the Euro area, where policy targets are price stability and full employment. To illustrate all of this there are numerical simulations of monetary policy, fiscal policy, and wage policy.

This book studies the international coordination of monetary and fiscal 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 and fiscal competition between Europe and America. Similarly, as to policy cooperation, the focus is on monetary and fiscal cooperation between Europe and America. The spillover effects of monetary policy are negative while the spillover effects of fiscal policy are positive. The policy targets are price stability and full employment. The policy makers follow either cold-turkey or gradualist strategies. Policy expectations are adaptive or rational. The world economy consists of two, three or more regions. The present book is part of a larger research project on European Monetary Union, see the references at the back of the book. Some parts of this project were presented at the World Congress of the International Economic Association in Lisbon. Other parts were presented at the International Institute of Public Finance, at the Macro Study Group of the German Economic Association, at the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association, at the Gottingen Workshop on International Economics, at the Halle Workshop on Monetary Economics, at the Research Seminar on Macroeconomics in Freiburg, and at the Passau Workshop on International Economics.

This book is designed to contribute to this debate on monetary union in Europe by using large scale macroeconomic models of the world economy, including the OECD Interlink model and the widely used NiGEM model, to evaluate the EMU, the EMS and the floating exchange rate policies. Various modelling groups address the issues facing Europe and the implications for policy analysis.

This chapter discusses various aspects of policy coordination in the European Monetary System (EMS). The purpose of the first paper in this chapter is to provide a survey of the process of European monetary integration, with focus on the EMS, its purposes, evolution, and the experience gathered since its establishment in early 1979. In its present stage of evolution, the EMS has developed a body of general institutional procedures to promote consistency among the policies and objectives of participating countries. The search for consistency inevitably gives rise to consequent constraints, such as those implicit in the specific rules on exchange rate and international reserve management that characterize the exchange rate mechanism (ERM). By drawing on an analysis of the role of monetary policy in balance of payments adjustment under different monetary systems and exchange rate arrangements, the second paper focuses on the crucial issues involved when an attempt is made to set rules for monetary policy coordination in a system of fixed but adjustable exchange rates such as the EMS.

This book explores the scope and limits of macroeconomic policy in a monetary union. The focus is on pure policies, policy mixes, and policy coordination. The leading protagonists are the union central bank, national governments, and national trade unions. Special emphasis is put on wage shocks and wage restraint. This book develops a series of basic, intermediate, and advanced models. The monetary union is an open economy with high capital mobility. The exchange rate between the monetary union and the rest of the world is floating. The world interest rate can be exogenous or endogenous. The union countries may differ in money demand, consumption, imports, openness, or size. A striking feature is the numerical estimation of policy multipliers. A lot of diagrams serve to illustrate the subject in hand.