Money Markets and Politics: A Study of European Financial Integration and Monetary Policy Options

The dramatic evolution of financial markets in the 1980s and 1990s, accompanied by increasing institutional integration between nations (most notably in the EU), have fostered a widespread belief that governments - particularly those of small economies - have essentially lost the power to pursue sovereign, independent economic policies. At the same time, it is widely assumed that the loss of monetary-policy control is a major opportunity cost for a country adopting a rigid exchange-rate regime or, in the European context, for countries joining the EMU. This volume assesses the impact of monetary and financial integration on small "open-economy", "policy-taking" countries in western Europe.