Adjustment and Growth in the European Monetary Union

The December 1991 Maastricht Treaty set a timetable for the European Community’s economic and monetary union and clearly defined the institutional and policy changes that must precede it. The economics of the transition - and indeed of an established monetary union - received much less attention at the time. Policy-makers’ neglect of the many difficult and unresolved issues in that transition proved to be a serious mistake as the successive crises that dominated Europe’s currency markets from September 1992 onwards demonstrated. This volume reports the proceedings of a joint CEPR conference with the Banco de Portugal held in January 1992. In these papers, leading international experts address the instability of that transition and the long-run implications of monetary union and the single market for Europe-wide economic growth and its convergence across countries.