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What difference does Euro membership make to stabilization? The political economy of international monetary systems revisited

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  • Deborah Mabbett
  • Waltraud Schelkle

Abstract

For many political economists, the loss of monetary sovereignty is the major reason why the Southern periphery fared so badly in the Euro area crisis. Monetary sovereignty here means the ability of the central bank to devalue the exchange rate or to buy government debt by printing the domestic currency. We explore this diagnosis by comparing three countries - Hungary, Latvia and Greece - that received considerable amounts of external assistance under different monetary regimes. The evidence does not suggest that monetary sovereignty helped Hungary and Latvia to stabilize their economies. Rather, cooperation and external assistance made foreign banks share in the costs of stabilization. By contrast, the provision of liquidity by the European Central Bank inadvertently facilitated the reduction of foreign banks' exposure to Greece which left the Greek sovereign even more exposed. By viewing the Euro area as a monetary system rather than an incomplete state, we see that what is needed for Euro area stabilization is cooperation over banking union, rather than a fully-fledged federal budget.

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  • Deborah Mabbett & Waltraud Schelkle, 2015. "What difference does Euro membership make to stabilization? The political economy of international monetary systems revisited," Review of International Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(3), pages 508-534, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:rripxx:v:22:y:2015:i:3:p:508-534
    DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2014.916625
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    1. Waltraud Schelkle, 2018. "The political economy of monetary solidarity: revisiting the euro experiment," Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft - WuG, Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte für Wien, Abteilung Wirtschaftswissenschaft und Statistik, vol. 44(3), pages 371-403.
    2. David Howarth & Lucia Quaglia, 2015. "The political economy of the euro area's sovereign debt crisis: introduction to the special issue of the Review of International Political Economy," Review of International Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(3), pages 457-484, June.
    3. Collignon, Stefan & Esposito, Piero, 2021. "Macroeconomic imbalances in Europe: How to overcome the fallacy of unit labour costs," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 43(3), pages 673-691.
    4. Schelkle, Waltraud, 2018. "The political economy of monetary solidarity: revisiting the Euro experiment," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 90201, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    5. Zachary Kramer, 2019. "Fiscal Sovereignty under EU Crisis Management: A Comparison of Greece and Hungary," Acta Oeconomica, Akadémiai Kiadó, Hungary, vol. 69(4), pages 595-624, December.

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