Designing Stabilization Policy in a Monetary Union.

While the European Monetary Union (EMU) is now a real ity, debate among economists nonetheless continues about the design and desirability of monetary unions.Since an essential element of a monetary union is the delegation of monetary power to a single centralized entity, one of the key issues in this debate is whether a monetary union will limit the effectiveness of stabilization policy. If so, monetary union will not necessarily be welfare improving. Inthis paper, we studya two-country world economy and consider various designs of monetary union.