"Progress Toward a European Monetary Union"

Kaufmann, Hugo M. and Overturf, Stephen. (1991) "Progress Toward a European Monetary Union". In: UNSPECIFIED, Fairfax, Virginia. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

[From the Introduction]. On March 13, 1991, the European Monetary System (EMS) celebrated its twelfth birthday with a sense that the system, originally launched by French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, had progressed much further toward accomplishing the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) goals established in the Werner Report of 1970 than any institutional development of the previous decade. Indeed, the tumultuous economic events of the 1970s saw the collapse of Bretton Woods international monetary system and the transition to the (managed) floating exchange rate (non)system; the two oil crises, OPEC I and OPEC 11; and bouts with extraordinary inflation in the United States and in many other industrial countries. In addition, most governments of the European Community (EC) were not ready effectively to coordinate their economic policies and had left the attempt at narrowing the margins of permissible exchange rate fluctuations through the European narrow-margins-arrangement (the "snake") which became a Deutsche mark (DM) zone with few stability-oriented members (Belgium-Luxembourg and the Netherlands).

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