Multilateral Divisia monetary aggregates for the Euro Area

In light of the “two-pillar strategy” of the European Central Bank, good measures of aggregated money across countries in the Euro area are policy relevant. The objective of this paper is to focus on the multilateral Divisia monetary aggregates for the Euro area to produce a theoretically consistent measure of monetary services for the Euro area monetary union. Based on theory developed in Barnett (2007), the multilateral Divisia monetary aggregates for 17 Euro area countries are found to provide a better signal of recession, when compared to the corresponding simple sum monetary aggregates.