Recent moves towards greater monetary integration in Western Europe - and disintegration in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union - have rekindled interest in the theoretical and empirical aspects of optimal currency areas (OCA). In this paper, we examine the marginal benefit of increasing the number of currency unions within a given geographical area. We look at six regions; the United States, Europe, the G7, the CFA zone, the FSU and the world at large. Our results suggest that (i) contiguous monetary unions are typically dominated by non-contiguous unions; (ii) neither Europe nor the United States form an optimum currency area, for both regions the costs of adopting a single currency exceeds estimates of the transaction cost savings; (iii) Germany and the United States will almost never find it to their (economic) advantage to join monetary unions.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
4805.
Length: Date of creation: Jul 1994 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:4805
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Alberto Alesina & Robert J. Barro & Silvana Tenreyro, 2002.
"Optimal Currency Areas,"
NBER Working Papers
9072, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Alberto Alesina & Robert J. Barro & Silvana Tenreyro, 2003.
"Optimal Currency Areas,"
NBER Chapters,
in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2002, Volume 17, pages 301-356
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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