What purpose does the European Monetary System serve? Who benefits from it? Is it a Deutschmark zone? Or could one argue that, despite the asymmetrical positions of France and Germany, the System does serve a certain collective interest? An attempt to answer these questions reveals a basic...

Recent analyses of the gains to policy coordination have focussed on the strategic aspects of macroeconomic policy making in a static setting. A major theme is that noncooperative policy making is likely to be Pareto inefficient because of the presence of beggar-thy-neighbor policies. This paper...