Who will join EMU?
R. Sean Craig No 480, International Finance Discussion Papers from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) Abstract: To qualify for European Monetary Union (EMU) countries must meet convergence criteria established in the Maastricht treaty of December 1991. However, an analysis of how difficult it will be to meet the convergence criteria is not sufficient to identify the countries most likely to join EMU in 1999. This paper identifies a number of factors in addition to budget deficit reduction required to qualify for EMU such as; the persistence of inflationary expectations; the variance of output shocks; the inflationary bias to monetary policy; and, the political cost to not joining EMU. Moreover, countries follow a policy rule where a large negative output shocks can cause them to abandon the restrictive policies necessary to qualify for EMU and, instead, use policy for stabilization. Concern about such a policy shift could cause increases in interest rates similar t
