The paper analyzes the usefulness of budgetary cooperation in a monetary union, even if it is limited to a subgroup of countries with close structural characteristics. The author finds that its advantages depend on the nature of the shocks and on the width of the heterogeneities within the...

The paper studies the opportunity to introduce a centralized insurance mechanism in Europe. Indeed, in a monetary union, monetary policy can efficiently stabilize common shocks but it is much less usable in case of asymmetrical shocks and /or if the countries are structurally heterogeneous....