IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ecpoli/v13y1998i26p262-303..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Blessing or curse? Foreign and underground demand for euro notes

Author

Listed:
  • Kenneth Rogoff

Abstract

Summary Public finance solutions to the European unemployment problem?Developing countries may hold as much as 25-30% of the $1.3 trillion OECD currency supply. Although dollar holdings appear to exceed DM holdings by a factor of four, the advent of the euro may change this balance. Indeed, by issuing large-denomination notes of 100, 200 and 500, the European Central Bank appears to be well poised to challenge the dominance of the ubiquitous US $100 note. However, large-denomination notes are also extremely popular in the OECD underground economy, which appears to hold at least 50% of the currency supply. As a result, the seigniorage revenues obtained by issuing large-denomination notes may be an accounting illusion, substantially or fully offset by losses due to increased tax evasion. Hence, the new European Central Bank may wish to consider policies that discourage underground use of currency, even at the expense of losing out on foreign demand.— Kenneth Rogoff

Suggested Citation

  • Kenneth Rogoff, 1998. "Blessing or curse? Foreign and underground demand for euro notes," Economic Policy, CEPR, CESifo, Sciences Po;CES;MSH, vol. 13(26), pages 262-303.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:ecpoli:v:13:y:1998:i:26:p:262-303.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/1468-0327.00033
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ecpoli:v:13:y:1998:i:26:p:262-303.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cebruuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.