The article is concerned with analysis of independence of central banks of the EU Member States within the framework of the ESCB, as well as independence and responsibility of the ECB, and suggests an alternative institutional embodiment of its position, reflecting the specific framework of the...

With the accession of 10 new European Union member states in May 2004, much attention is being placed on the governance of European Community institutions. This article focuses specifically on discussions of European Central Bank (ECB) governance, particularly as regards the ECB?s amendment of...

A number of authors have used the concept of an optimum currency area (or OCA) index to assess the relative proximity of various pairs of economies to the ideal of an optimum currency area. Alas, a significant deficiency of this approach as used so far is that it provides no room for long-term...

Even though the efforts to foster global economic governance have been a longstanding issue of global economic policies, their effectiveness has been questioned by the current crisis. The crisis has revealed many systemic issues that would require global solutions on the one hand, but on the...

As a consequence of the new regionalism a marked increase in the number of regional groupings can be observed which makes the preferential relations between states even more complicated and complex. One of such complex relationships, which did not come to being during the third wave of...

Future of the European Union and its future directions should be the most important subject of the European Studies, which combine studies of Economy, Political Science, International Relations and other disciplines to study the European Integration Process in its complexity. This applies...

The objective of this article is to provide a survey of basic facts about process of globalization. We can define globalization as the international economic integration through particular markets. Globalization is largely continual and objective process that began approximately in the middle of...

International monetary system made by agreement in Bretton – Woods, is widely known to be the system of fixed exchange rates with allowed +/- 1% band of oscillation. As such, it is viewed as the period of exchange rates stability. However, our analysis of Reinhart – Rogoff’s (2004)...

The paper provides an introduction to essays published in this volume, which focus on nominal and real convergence in transition countries. The paper is based on the idea that the process of convergence can, to a large extent, be viewed via developments in real exchange rates. Key issues...

Czech Abstract: Článek s užitím teorie optimálních měnových oblastí (OCA) zkoumá, které z nových členských zemí EU jsou vhodným kandidátem přijetí jednotné měny euro. K posouzení vhodnosti přijetí jednotné měny je užit index optimální měnové oblasti. Index je pro...