Europe, and especially the European Union, faces major challenges from the policies of the second Trump administration, which affect not only trade but also energy, defence, digital services and payments. Uncertainty around US decisions has raised questions about the stability of the...

I study price level determination in a currency union when some member countries' government securities earn a convenience yield. These "convenience assets" generate fiscal seigniorage revenues that, given appropriate fiscal and monetary policies, back the union's price level, much like primary...

Dollar-denominated stablecoins are expanding rapidly. For Europe, this is not merely a technological development. The deeper question is strategic: who controls the infrastructure through which money circulates? Even where prices, contracts and accounting remain denominated in euro, a growing...

Concerns about the prospective evolution of seigniorage collected by central banks as a result of innovation in the field of money and payments are not new. They have resurfaced recently with the prospect of stablecoins gaining traction. This paper considers that commercial banks also collect a...

In the Hellenistic era, there was widespread convergence to the Attic standard and a similar narrowing of coin types in terms of aesthetics. The competition between issuers resulted in an equilibrium in which improvements to the consistency and quality of money were sought after. This...

The distributional and disruptive effects of energy supply shocks are potentially large. We study the effectiveness of alternative fiscal responses in a two-country HANK model calibrated to the euro area. Subsidies can stabilize the domestic economy, but they are fiscally costly and generate...

The 1955-56 macroeconomic crisis is a central event in modern Irish history. Yet, despite this centrality, its causes are not clearly understood. In 1955-6, Ireland, which had previously followed British interest rates in lockstep as part of its fixed exchange with the latter, briefly...

The 1955-56 macroeconomic crisis is a central event in modern Irish history. Yet, despite this centrality, its causes are not clearly understood. In 1955-6, Ireland, which had previously followed British interest rates in lockstep as part of its fixed exchange with the latter, briefly...

The rise of cryptocurrencies over the past decade has promised to challenge the dominance of fiat money systems and reshape monetary policy. However, recent developments, including market volatility and the collapse of key exchanges like FTX, have eroded public trust, raising skepticism of a...

"Portugal in the 21st Century provides a thorough yet accessible picture of contemporary Portugal in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It examines and elucidates Portugal's recent trajectory, its current position, and the main challenges it faces through an examination of the...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes domestic revenue mobilization (DRM) in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). DRM is critical for financing economic and social development and ensuring debt sustainability in WAEMU, especially in light of rising interest, high security...

This paper presents IMF staff report on common policies for member countries of West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). Economic growth continues to be strong in the WAEMU. Inflation has fallen back to its target range, and recent improvements in regional external imbalances are...

This Selected Issues paper examines the impact of the energy transition (ET) and strategies to achieve it in the Easter Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU). Reducing energy dependence in the ECCU entails improving energy efficiency and shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy (RE). This ET is...

This paper presents a detailed review report for the 2025 Discussion on Common Policies of Member Countries of the Easter Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU). The currency union has provided a strong anchor for macroeconomic stability. The ECCU has achieved a strong rebound from successive adverse...

This paper assesses the causal relationship between central bank interest rate, inflation and GDP growth in Central African countries using a new leading-lagging method over the period 1990-2019. The results show a short-term relationship between the three variables, with strong evidence of...

Based on original archival research, interviews, media sources and wide ranging academic literature, this study focuses on the European Parliament's leading and agenda-setting role in the process of European monetary integration. Important initiatives included the 1962 Van Campen Report on the...

We investigate how the composition of expenditure shapes the transmission of monetary policy in a currency union. European Monetary Union data reveal three facts: (1) higher inequality countries have larger service expenditure shares; (2) monetary policy has a weaker output impact in these...

Since mid-2021, the euro-area economy has gone through several shocks, leading to the highest inflation since the creation of the European Monetary Union. A forceful and persistent response from the European Central Bank, grounded in the monetary policy framework it agreed in 2021 ahead of the...

The financial situation of households differs substantially across countries, but the implications of this heterogeneity are still vastly understudied. We examine the implications of this asymmetry for optimal monetary policy in a currency union. We build a two-country monetary union model with...

This study examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the CFA franc (XOF) compared to the euro (EUR) within the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). It is among the first to assess both currencies under systemic stress by combining event studies, risk metrics, and ARDL regressions....

The Werner Report and the Delors Report played a crucial role in the EMU process. The vision of EMU of the two reports differed significantly. The Werner Report was in favor of an EMU with both a supranational monetary pillar (a European System of Central Banks) and a supranational economic...

Climate change poses severe risks to developing economies, particularly those in the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ), where agriculture and climate-sensitive sectors drive growth. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and extreme weather events increasingly disrupt output, fuel inflation, and...

This article is focusing on the economic literature attempting to solve the problem of the impossible trilemmas of the euro area, by reconciling the relations between the three essential pillars - supranational monetary independence, national fiscal independence and the no bail-out clause...

We study how financial integration shapes the transmission of monetary policy to consumer prices and output in the euro area. Using local projections, we document that the effect of financial integration is continuous: greater integration systematically strengthens the pass-through of monetary...

This paper develops a world economy HANK model for the Euro Area (EA) Core and Periphery, which captures key features of EA cross‐ and within‐country heterogeneity, to study debt target reforms. We show that fiscal consolidation under the current EA institutional arrangements is quite costly...

This paper assesses the impact of pegging the CFA franc to the euro - at a fixed parity - on real GDP per capita in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) and the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CAEMC) countries. Using a set of 35 annual country-level panel data...

This paper analyzes the role of the nature of traded goods in the effect of the real exchange rate on the trade balance in West African Economy and Monetary Union countries. Empirically, the estimation of the parameters of a distributed lag autoregressive model using the technique of dynamic...

The key lesson of the first twenty five years of the euro is that the ECB is embedded in an incomplete and flawed institutional context. Its role has increasingly emerged as an integration agency in the face of existential threats to the euro. The way the world is going to change will put the...

We use a theoretical model to set up the conditions for a country to attain monetary stability by allowing for two freely tradable currencies to circulate in parallel. For this parallel system to function properly, confidence in the good behavior of the monetary authorities in charge of the two...

This article examines the effects of monetary integration on the synchronization of the business cycle within ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) and contributes to the economic literature dealing with these aspects. First, the indicators of de facto and de jure central bank...