IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/econwp/qt40m5g6pp.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Is Europe an Optimum Currency Area?

Author

Listed:
  • Eichengreen, Barry

Abstract

An optimum currency area (OCA) is an economic unit composed of regions affected symmetrically by disturbances and between which labour and other factors of production flow freely (Mundell, 1961). Insofar as regions within the OCA experience the same shocks, there is no obvious advantage to altering relative prices between them. Insofar as localized concentrations of unemployment nonetheless remain, the free mobility of labour from high- to low-unemployment regions can eliminate the problem. It is hence optimal to dispense with one of the principal instruments — changes in the exchange rate — traditionally used to effect relative price adjustments, and to reap the benefits, in terms of convenience and efficiency, of a common currency.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Eichengreen, Barry, 1990. "Is Europe an Optimum Currency Area?," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt40m5g6pp, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdl:econwp:qt40m5g6pp
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/40m5g6pp.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    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:cdl:econwp:qt40m5g6pp. 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: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ibbrkus.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.