torsdag 14 februari 2013

EMU-artiklar

Detta är en klippsamling utifrån en rad artiklar om EMU och dess konstruktion, som jag använt i min undervisning.

Obstfeld 1997
Berkeley-nationalekonomen Maurice Obstfelds uppsats "Europe's Gamble" från 1997 är en av klassikerna i EMU-litteraturen.

"EMU is a gamble that can be won in the long run only if it overcomes the existing political stasis to force fundamental fiscal and labor market reform in its member states. If Europe's leaders cannot do an end run around domestic opposition in the name of European integration, EMU could prove unstable." (242)

sent 80-tal:
"In this policy environment, the proposal by the Delors Report of a three-stage plan for the creation of a single currency, to be issued by a European Central Bank (ECB), found widespread support. For countries with credibility problems, a single currency would lead to lower interest rates and possibly to greater wage discipline. Speculation on EU exchange rate changes would disappear. The European Commission subsequently advanced detailed arguments for EMU on efficiency grounds.8 But from a political point of view, the most potent motivating force behind support of the Delors proposals was the desire to end the preponderant control of EMS monetary policy by the German Bundesbank. Germany's partners in the ERM effectively pegged their currencies to the deutsche mark, just as all had pegged to the dollar under Bretton Woods. Through the ECB, however, all EMU members, not only Germany, would have a voice in setting interest rates." (246f)

Sinn (1996): "öppen hemlighet" att EMU var Frankrikes krav för att tillåta Tysklands återförening

s 251f Maastrichtkriterierna: till för att se till att euron blir en hård valuta, och för att hålla ute syndare som Italien, Portugal och Spanien.

s 266 "The intransigent budget deficits in Germany and France have proven to be a major embarrassment to German chancellor Helmut Kohl's government, and perhaps the greatest threat to an on-time departure for EMU. Germany promoted the deficit criterion in part to exclude Italy from the first wave of members. Sharply rising German unemployment in 1996-97, coupled with unwillingness of Chancellor Kohl's coalition partners to approve new tax increases, has left Germany's anticipated 1997 deficit uncomfortably close to that of Italy. To make matters worse, France's deficit prospects resemble Germany's, and EMU cannot succeed as a European institution unless it includes these two core players. But if both France and Germany are in, the Germans may have little basis for a push to exclude Italy."

s 268f OCA, Mundell. Exempel med exogen chock i Spanien.
s 269- fördelar med euro. Kostar inte att växla. Ökad handel.

s 271 "The drive toward EMU has fundamentally changed domestic political equilibria, strengthening the hands of central banks and of those elements (primarily, but not exclusively, in the business community) favoring greater integration into Europe and domestic economic and institutional reform. If the new European central bank can keep inflation in check, the single currency will enhance and cement these gains."

s 274 "It is sometimes argued that EMU will promote wage and price flexibility by removing the possibility of an accommodative currency realignment, but if that hypothesis were true, one would expect to see much greater wage-price flexibility within Germany than there appears to be. Industry-level wage bargaining-which currently prevails at the national but not at the European level-could explain this result. However, there is little in the experience of the EMS to suggest that even longstanding pegs have had much direct effect on wage and price flexibility."

s 276 O tveksam till om EMU verkligen tvingar fram (effektivitetsökande) liberaliseringar
s 278 att ordet "tillväxt" kom med i "stabilitets- och tillväxtspakten" är en eftergift till FR
s 279 förbuden mot obligationsköp för ECB och för bailouts
s 287 "Defenders of EMU contend that Europe's real wage rigidities render the nominal exchange rate a rather ineffective, and inflationary, mode of adjustment. The implication is that EMU members give up little by way of attractive policy options when they irrevocably lock their exchange rates."
s 288-296 ekonometrisk modellering av lönerigiditeter, á la Blanchard och Muet
s 300 "European economic integration has always been a politically motivated enterprise. And at the moment, the political costs of not proceeding with EMU bulk so large that Europe's leaders are desperate to start on time."

s 307 Richard N. Cooper i sin kommentar på Obstfelds paper: "To tie fiscal policy down removes one of a region's major defenses against asymmetrical shocks, namely, regionally adaptive fiscal policy. In moving to currency union, Europeans are necessarily tying their hands regionally on monetary policy. Through the Maastricht treaty, and even more so with the subsequently agreed Stability Pact, they are tying their hands regionally also on fiscal policy. This seems to me to be a mistake of the first order."
s 310 ur diskussionen: "Cooper was highly critical of the extreme independence and lack of accountability specified in the Maastricht treaty for the new European Central Bank, and of the bank's narrow charge to assure price stability. He argued that the ECB should ultimately be politically accountable either to a strengthened European Parliament (a pan-European approach) or to the Council of Ministers (a national approach) in the way the Bundesbank and Federal Reserve are accountable to representative bodies today. On the issue of responsibility, Cooper noted that the ECB's mandate does not even include assuring the functioning of the payment system and the stability of the financial structure, let alone employment stabilization."


Paul de Grauwe 2006
s 712 dG: i min lärobok The Economics of Monetary Integration från 1992 lyckades jag inte ta ställning till om monetär union var en bra eller dålig idé. Detta eftersom det fanns två teorier med olika prediktioner: Mundell 1 och Mundell 2. Mundell 1 är den klassiska OCA-teorin från Mundell (1961). Den använder tre kriterier: symmetri (i chocker), flexibilitet och integration. "Mundell 2" bygger på ett relativt obskyrt paper av Mundell från 1973. Denna utgår från en värld med stor kapitalrörlighet över gränser och menar att valutakurser inte reflekterar objektiva värderingar utan är bedömningar av imperfekta marknader: "For most countries, the exchange rate does not provide a degree of freedom but uses up a degree of freedom in their economic policy since they have to stabilize this asset price. Needless to say, this view is not very popular among the crowd of believers in the efficiency of the foreign exchange markets." (714) Utifrån Mundell 1 är et logiskt att vara negativ till EMU, och utifrån Mundell 2 logisk att vara positiv. De Grauwe menar att Mundell 2 stärktes i Europa under 1990-talet, både på grund av EMS-krisen 1992-93 och monetarismens ökade spridning, och spelade en roll i EMU:s skapande, men att ironiskt nog nu under 00-talet Mundell 2 återigen blivit mer aktuell, när länders utveckling i euron varit divergenta.

s 717 vad har vi lärt oss sedan Maastricht? d G vill fokusera på två saker: (1) endogena OCA såsom betonat av Frankel och Rose (1998), (2) governance i EMU.
"There are different mechanisms that can make the OCA criteria endogenous. First, monetary union can affect trade flows and intensify trade integration, thus increasing the benefits of the monetary union. Second, monetary integration leads to more intense financial integration thereby facilitating the emergence of insurance mechanisms. The latter reduce the costs of asymmetric shocks. Third, a monetary union affects the functioning of the labour markets and can potentially increase their flexibility, thereby reducing the costs of adjusting to asymmetric shocks in the monetary union." (717)
"Some authors (Bertola and Boeri, 2002; Blanchard and Giavazzi, 2003) argue that monetary union tends to increase the degree of flexibility of labour markets, while other authors (Sibert and Sutherland, 2000; Soskice and Iversen, 2001) conclude that a monetary union may not lead to more labour market flexibility." (719)
s 723 d G menar att av stabiliseringspolitiska skäl måste EMU förenas med omfördelning: "in order to enhance the sustainability of a monetary union it is important to have a central budget that can be used as a redistributive device between the Member States and it also matters to have some form of coordination of those areas of national economic policies that can generate macroeconomic shocks. The reason why this co-ordination is important is that these macroeconomic shocks spill over into the monetary union. For example, the decline in the working time in France was equivalent to a negative supply shock in France. This affected aggregate output in the euro area and thus the conduct of monetary policies by the ECB. This in turn influences all the other Member States of the euro area."
s 724f Frankfurt-Brussels consensus, baserat på monetarism och RBC
s 727 d G argumenterar för att världen är keynesiansk, inte RBC-monetaristisk. Därför behöver EMU omfördelning mellan stater.


Jabko 2011
s 7 "For a long time, successive French governments were a voice in the wilderness in favor of stronger economic governance (gouvernement économique) within the European Union. In February 2010, however, German Chancellor Angela Merkel mentioned for the first time the necessity of a European economic government (Wirtschaftsregierung). Merkel’s unexpected rapprochement with President Nicolas Sarkozy gave a second wind to the notion of gouvernement économique, yet the path to stronger economic governance remains elusive. The main difficulty today no longer stems from lingering French-German disagreements, but from an originally unforeseen conflict between national sovereignty and a new conception of sovereignty that called for its exercise at the European level. Sovereignty over Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union is fundamentally divided – monetary policy is unified at the EU level, yet most other powers remain firmly in the hands of national governments."
s 8 rapporten är policy-orienterad. "The challenge at this point is to shift toward an economic governance model that is realistic for the member states to adopt, yet bold enough to convince financial markets that the EU has found a credible development scenario for its Economic and Monetary Union." Tre begränsningar: (1) medlemsstaterna vill inte ha någon transferunion; (2) medlemsstaterna vill inte flytta mer bestämmande till Bryssel, och (3) medlemsstaternas regeringar vill inte ha minskad autonomi

Crafts 2012
-- "Faster productivity growth in the euro periphery could help improve competitiveness, fiscal arithmetic and living standards; the main role of a real Marshall Plan would be to promote supply-side reforms that raise productivity growth. This would repeat the main achievement of the original Marshall Plan of 1948."
-- guldstandardens kollaps på 1930-talet visar att EMU som "gyllene tvångströja" på medlemsregeringarna inte är ett hållbart alternativ


-- för EU förespråkar Crafts en version av "global federalism"-alternativet (s 6)


Shambaugh 2012
Tre kriser: "The euro area faces three interlocking crises that together challenge the viability of the currency union. There is a banking crisis: banks are undercapitalized and have faced liquidity problems. There is a sovereign debt crisis: a number of countries have faced rising bond yields and challenges funding themselves. Lastly, there is a growth crisis: economic growth is slow in the euro area overall and unequally distributed across countries. These crises connect with one another in several ways: the problems of weak banks and high sovereign debt are mutually reinforcing, and both are exacerbated by weak growth but also in turn constrain growth."
alltså: bankkris, statsskuldskris, ekonomisk kris


s 160 S: för lite uppmärksamhet ägnats åt den ekonomiska krisen/den dåliga tillväxten
s 160f S: EMU behöver inte en fiskal union. Däremot gemensam finansiell reglering. (jfr 205)
s 162 i eurozonen motsvarar bankernas tillgångar mer än 300 procent av BNP; motsvarande siffra för USA är 100 procent. Bankerna viktigare i Europa, och ekonomierna känsligare för bankernas fall.
s 173f OCA, arbetskraftens rörlighet
s 175 EMU:s asymmetriska konstruktion: "A combination of politics and ideology meant that public sector borrowing and inflation were supposed to be controlled, but private borrowing, banking system issues, unemployment, and other macroeconomic challenges were left unattended at the euro-area level. The politics of these choices made at the creation of the euro are beyond the scope of this paper, but the choices themselves have left great challenges for current policymakers."
s 179f intern devalvering. "One can evaluate the possibility of an internal devaluation in a number of ways. First, one can examine how often countries experience a real depreciation (domestic prices falling relative to prices in world markets) without a nominal depreciation (the domestic currency getting cheaper on world markets). In a recent paper (Shambaugh 2012), I use narrow trade-weighted exchange rate indexes from the Bank for International Settlements for a sample of 26 mostly developed countries stretching back to 1964. If one defines an internal devaluation as a change in the real exchange rate, without a similar move in the nominal exchange rate, of at least 3 percent in 1 year (or, alternatively, as at least a 5 percent change over 3 years or a 7 percent change over 5 years), then in this sample there have been 25 internal devaluations at the 1-year horizon, 26 at the 3-year horizon and 17 at the 5-year horizon (these 68 episodes are spread across roughly half the countries in the sample). Nearly all of these episodes, however, happened in the era of generalized higher inflation before 1991 (table 1). When world prices are rising by 10 percent a year, a country can have a substantial real depreciation simply by having lower (but still positive) inflation than its trading partners. Domestic prices and wages then do not need to fall for domestic goods and labor to become relatively cheaper on world markets. Moreover, although not reported in the table, internal revaluations, where prices increase faster than in trading partners, are roughly twice as common as internal devaluations. Since 1990 there have been, broadly speaking, only three examples of an internal devaluation in my sample." (180f) -- dessa tre är Hong Kong år 2000, Japan sent 90-tidigt 00-tal, och Irland i den nuvarande krisen. Lettland är inte med i Shambaughs sample men vore landet det så skulle dess nuvarande utveckling räknas.
-- Shambaugh har också kollat på "interna devalveringar" i 27 städer i USA 1960-2010.
s 183f varför Tysklands 00-tal inte räknas som intern devalvering
s 186 för att underlätta intern devalvering i PIIGS vore det bra om inflationen i resten av EZ hölls över 2 procent
s 186f en annan policyväg -- än ID -- är strukturella reformer. Men de hjälper på lång, inte kort, sikt.
s 187 - bankerna
s 192 - statsskuldskrisen och tillväxten
s 198 - bankkrisen och tillväxten
s 200 - S föreslagna policypaket. Inkluderar skattereformer, "fiscal devaluation", som efterliknar intern devalvering. Och mer expansiv penningpolitik. Och mer obligationsköpande av ECB. Och ekonomisk stimulanspolitik i de länder som har råd med det. Och S är också för någon typ av eurobonds (205f)


Darvas, Ferry och Sapir 2011
Tre skäl till att europeisk krispolitik som EFSF och ESM varit otillräcklig för att lösa krisen. (1) sett krisen som likviditetskris och ignorerat solvensproblemen. (2) ignorerat kopplingen mellan finansiella systemet och statsskulderna. (3) varit reaktiv inte proaktiv.

--Darvas et al menar att Grekland -- till skillnad från t ex Irland -- är insolvent och behöver en skuldnedskrivning (s 5)
s 9-13 reformprogram för Grekland

Enderlein et al 2012
-- förord av Delors och Helmut Schmidt
s 1 "In April 1987, a Study Group on the “Integration Strategy of the European Community” chaired by Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa1 published a Report that later became the basis for Economic and Monetary Union in Europe. That Report referred to four points that it considered to be “the basis of the long-term “social contract” between the Community and its Member States”: (I) competitive markets, (II) monetary stability, (III) an equitable distribution of the gains in economic welfare, and (IV) actual growth performance. These four elements have indeed constituted the basis for further political and economic integration in Europe in the past 25 years. Today, the members of the “Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa Group” consider that the European social contract is at risk."
s 5 snömosig sammanfattning av vad de förespråkar: "What is needed is a sui generis form of fiscal federalism, which derives from the functional deficiencies of the current common currency framework while respecting to the largest possible extent the budgetary autonomy of euro area member countries. We argue that the single currency requires as much fiscal federalism as necessary for its appropriate functioning, but as little as possible."
s 6 "domestic institutional adjustments to increase the responsiveness of wages and prices are also required."
s 6 "a cyclical stabilization insurance fund to counter some of the effects of the “one size fits none” monetary policy. Such an insurance fund, which should be created outside the EU budget and remain under direct control of national parliaments, would work in a largely automatic fashion and, if rightly devised, not lead to long-term transfers in only one direction."
s 6f "The third element is a rebalancing of fiscal rights and fiscal duties in the common currency area. We argue that euro area countries should become subject to much stricter budgetary surveillance and be willing to give up some elements of their sovereignty when they are cut off from the market. The core principle should be: sovereignty ends when solvency ends. But at the same time, the euro area as a whole should ensure that adequately priced access to sovereign financing is generally possible, also in times of crisis. To allow for the implementation of that third element, we suggest the creation of a European Debt Agency (EDA) that would allow a flexible refinancing possibility to countries in exchange for a stepwise transfer of sovereignty. The EDA would (i) be jointly and severally guaranteed by all euro area countries, (ii) serve as a normal financing instrument for an amount of 10% of GDP to all countries, (iii) provide relatively easy access to additional funding in crisis times for relatively small amounts (up to an additional 10% of a country’s GDP), (iv) but then ask for much stricter conditionality in pre-defined steps of rising debt amounts with additional debt amounts implying a stepwise transfer of budgetary oversight to the EDA.
s 7 "The fourth element is a euro area banking union. To solve the paradoxical set-up of financial market integration and banking supervision, the creation of a euro area banking supervision authority with micro-prudential supervision powers is required. This role could be conferred upon the ECB. In parallel, the creation of an agency administrating a European deposit insurance fund would be required."

Lord 2012
"This report examines the role of all of the following in the legitimacy of monetary union: a) the consent of member states, b) public support, c) policy outcomes, d) fairness and justice e) and democratic control. Yet, at the end of the day, the report argues that the last of these items - democratic control - governs all the other four."
"Of course, democratic control raises difficult questions for the institutional design of monetary union. The report considers three in detail, as follows:
1. Is it possible to secure some form of ’ultimate democratic control’ over the European Central Bank without undermining the arguments that are thought to justify independent central banking in the first place?
2. How should democratic control over monetary union be distributed between national democratic institutions and the European Parliament? /.../
3. How can monetary union be reconciled with political equality conditions for democracy when the national democracies of member states seem to be so unequal in their power over monetary union, and when monetary union seems to ’depoliticise’ and ’constitutionalise’ decisions of economic policy in ways that create inequalities in favour of those who want to defend, rather than challenge, existing commitments?"
s 9 "Writing in the Financial Times at the end of February, Peter Spiegel remarked: ‘Almost unnoticed to the public, the European Union has begun to transform itself into an organisation with far more central power to take decisions that affect nations’ economic policies’ (Peter Spiegel, Financial Times 29 February 2012). Spiegel went on to give the following examples.
• ‘The European Commission has been given authority to demand spending cuts under threat of large fines’;
• ‘A €500b rescue fund will soon be available to spend taxpayer funds without intervention of national parliaments’;
• The Union is preparing a ‘fiscal compact that requires balanced budgets and close co-ordination of everything from debt issuance to all major economic reforms’;
• ‘Brussels may be allowed to send monitoring teams to national capitals unilaterally’."
s 10 "These ‘four C’s’ - greater coercion, collectivisation, conditionality and constitutionalisation – raise the question of legitimacy, or, in other words, of whether the Union has a sufficient right to exercise the new powers it is acquiring under monetary union for it to be entitled to the ‘obedience’ of all those whose compliance it may need if it is to exercise those powers effectively?"



Referenser
Paul de Grauwe, "What Have we Learnt about Monetary Integration since the Maastricht Treaty?", Journal of Common Market Studies, 2006
Nicholas Jabko, "Which Economic Governance for the European Union? Facing up to the Problem of Divided Sovereignty", 2011
Lars Jonung och Eoin Drea http://econjwatch.org/articles/it-can-t-happen-it-s-a-bad-idea-it-won-t-last-us-economists-on-the-emu-and-the-euro-1989-2002
Maurice Obstfeld, "Europe's Gamble", Brookings 1997

Jonung och Drea om Obstfeld (1997): "Maurice Obstfeld (1997), reviewing the costs and benefits of monetary union in Europe, concluded that although the broad membership of EMU made it ighly vulnerable to asymmetric shocks, EMU might succeed economically. This would greatly enhance the process of European integration and generate social and political benefits in the future. In addition, he believed that economic success of the euro would drive political integration." (26)
Obstfeld (1997) var ovanligt eurooptimistisk för att vara en amerikansk ekonom vid denna tid. Feldstein (1997), Frieden (1998), Willen (2000) med flera argumenterade för att EMU var ett ekonomiskt irrationellt begrepp som drevs framåt av politiska viljor till ökad europeisk integration per se. Tobin (1997), Salvatore (1998) pekade på att euroområdet inte var någon optimal valutaunion och att asymmetriska chocker skulle bli svåra test för EMU; "Dominick Salvatore (1997) concluded that due to limited labor mobility and inadequate fiscal redistribution, a major asymmetric shock would cause the euro area to dissolve".

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