The European Union (EU) is about to achieve its dream of creating a monetary union. The road to monetary union started at the Hague Summit of 1969, which inspired the Werner Report of 1970 and many other reports and proposals, and led all the way to the Accord that the European heads of state...

Following a Royal Edict to adopt universal suffrage in election for local government institutions, maiden elections were held in 199 gewogs (counties) in Bhutan in 2002 to elect their chief executives. This paper gives an account of this first time event in a country where most villagers had...

Economic theory has recently begun to consider the economic impact of narratives. Narrative economics can also be extended to the analysis of the economic-political effect of narratives in the context of the European core-periphery divide, which intensified after the European sovereign-debt...

This paper tackles the issue of the optimality of agglomeration in a two-region economy with skilled/mobile and unskilled/immobile workers. The market leads to the optimal outcome when transport costs are high or low. However, for intermediate values, it yields agglomeration whereas dispersion...

This paper analyses the interaction between comparative advantages , social protection, and the political system. Considering entirely symmetrical countries whose production factors are immobile, we suggest that redistributive policies can be 'imported' or 'exported' depending on their impact on...

In this paper, I consider two heterogeneous economies that engage in a currency union. The small economy adopts the currency of the large and is highly dependent on its wealthier partner for trade. The effects of a currency union, deficit financing and institutional restraints on inflation are...