External Constraints on Macroeconomic Policy: The European Experience
It has long been recognized that openness is a mixed blessing for many European economies. While it offers the opportunity of international and intertemporal trade, it also imposes additional constraints on the design of stabilization policies. The exact nature of these constraints is not always clear and there remains much uncertainty about their quantitative importance and their dependence on the exchange rate regime.
Under the fixed exchange rates of the 1950s, economists and policy-makers had a much clearer idea of the nature of the external constraint. The current situtation is markedly different, and is changing rapidly. The commitment to defending the exchange rate is stronger in the 1990s than in the 1970s and 1980s, but at the same time international capital flows are now far greater and freer than in the 1950s and 1960s, with many countries able to borrow almost indefinitely and on good terms on the Eurodollar market in order to finance their balance-of-payments deficits.
This volume deals with the implications of these developments for macroeconomic policy-making and policy coordination within the European Community. It is derived from a conference organized jointly by CEPR and the Bank of Greece, deals with these issues in depth, and includes both cross-country comparisons and case studies of individual countries.