What if the UK had Joined the Euro in 1999?

The issue of whether the UK should join the European single currency has been fiercely debated for the past two decades. However little research has been devoted to forecasting hypothetical projections for important UK economic variables, assuming that the UK had in fact joined the euro at its inception in 1999. This paper focuses on estimating counterfactual series for two key macroeconomic variables: unemployment and output. We do this by estimating Phillips curves for the UK, which we then use to compute counterfactual series for what unemployment and output may have looked like for the UK had they adopted the single currency in 1999. Based on the comparison of our forecasts with observed data, we find that the UK was correct in not joining the euro; had they adopted the European single currency in 1999, unemployment would have been higher and output would have been lower. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013