Policy Coordination In The European Monetary System

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.

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.

Despite the progression towards the formation of European Monetary Union (EMU) there still exists considerable disagreement between economists about the relative merits of the current European Monetary System (EMS), EMU and a return to independent policy under floating exchange rates. 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. The objective of the book is to show that the path to monetary uni

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.

This volume presents some of the best current research on international economic policy coordination.