The eurozone is not, and never has been, an optimal currency area, so it was always going to be poorly placed to cope with a major systemic shock. The institutional mechanisms to allow underperforming members to adjust are defective. The dominant member, Germany, has refused to voluntarily adopt a leadership role to assist fellow members in their adjustment to the shock – and in fact, politically, has forced the deficit/debtor members down a punishing road of internal devaluation and a refusal of any debt write-downs that would impose costs on the German banking system.
At some point, one of two things will happen. Either the eurozone will implement reforms to cure these defects (imposing costs ultimately on German taxpayers, and amounting to much closer political union that radically alters the balance of power even further within the EU), or individual eurozone members will decide, as Britain did with the ERM in 1992, that the gain is no longer worth the pain and exit the arrangements (which in theory involves exit from the EU itself under the present Treaties). Whichever outcome occurs, it is likely to require treaty change. In this light, it makes little sense to consider Britain’s position within the EU in terms of ‘Business As Usual’.
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In other words, the eurozone will either integrate or disintegrate.
A decade or so ago, considerable academic attention was directed to the study of economic convergence in Europe. The dominant opinion was that even if European economies were not converging (as some American commentators found), they would converge over time.
In fact, while the eurozone countries had indeed exhibited economic convergence prior to 1999-2000, contemporary calculations suggest that they have actually diverged quite sharply since then. The members are more divergent now than they were in 1982.
Should Britain stay in or get out of the EU? Polling since 1977
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The period 2008-12 was mainly a financial (debt) crisis, with problems in, first, the national banking systems and then in national finances addressed in the short term through a process of bail-outs. The ECB was successful in pacifying the sovereign bond markets when President Mario Draghi declared his readiness to make direct market purchases of distressed bonds issued by eurozone members. Despite this, Europe has fallen into an economic crisis. All along, there have been bouts of political crisis, as the governments of the member countries disagreed on how to deal with the past problems while minimising moral hazards.
The real political crisis will arise when eurozone leaders are forced to confront the dilemma of the single currency’s inflexibility: integrate or disintegrate. What has happened in Greece is one example of how the situation in Europe is degenerating. No one should believe that Greece will be the only member country that struggles to remain in the eurozone.
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The euro was supposed to herald a new era of stability and prosperity within the EU, and be so successful that every EU member would wish to join, and nobody would ever want to leave. Much of the conventional thinking here rests upon a lynchpin assumption: that the eurozone members, if not those in the EU as a whole, are indeed becoming ‘ever closer’ simply by virtue of being members of the same system.
When the proposition is tested, however, the findings are that, rather than converging, the eurozone members are actually becoming more divergent. Our study covers the period from 1981-2014, allowing a comprehensive assessment to be made of both the ‘pre-EMU’ and ‘post-EMU’ experiences. It examines a sample group of ‘EMU-11’ countries: Austria, Belgium, France, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.
Figure 1: Estimated Demand and Supply Shocks for the EMU-11
Source: SLJ Macro Partners
Figure 1 plots the estimated demand and supply shocks hitting the EMU-11 economies, collectively. The negative demand shocks, such as during the ERM Crisis in the early-1990s, the 2009 post-global financial crisis, and the EMU debt crisis in 2011-12 can be seen clearly in the declines in the red line.
What is perhaps more important and remarkable in Figure 1.1.iii is the persistence of the negative supply shocks that have impinged on the EMU economy since the launch of the euro. These supply shocks are shown by the blue bars in Figure 1.1.iii. These simulations suggest that events like the rise of emerging markets, and particularly China, which joined the WTO in 2001, have been very consequential for the EMU. The decline of production costs and the expansion of these consumer markets appear to have affected the EMU economies in very different ways. While some German firms successfully capitalised on the opportunities arising from globalisation, other firms and countries in the EMU region faced increasing competitive pressures.
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Figure 2: Estimated Asymmetry of Demand and Supply Shocks across the EMU 11
Source: SLJ Macro Partners
Figure 2 plots a measure of the asymmetry of the demand and supply shocks across the EMU-11 countries. A rise in economic divergence (or asymmetry of shocks) is shown as an upward movement in this chart.
These results indicate, first, that both the demand and supply shocks significantly declined from the 1980s until around 2000. This coincides with the findings of many research papers published around the time of the launch of the euro. However, after that point the trend for both types of shock has reversed and increased significantly in magnitude.
The demand asymmetry measures are now significantly higher than the estimated levels in the 1980s and the supply asymmetry measures have also continued to deteriorate (i.e., showing more divergences) since the global financial crisis in 2008. Furthermore, the point at which the lines ‘flip’ on the chart can be dated to the period 2000-2002, so the findings cannot be dismissed as transient effects of the credit crunch since the phenomenon predates that event.
Figure 3: Correlation of Demand and Supply Shocks of the EMU-11 with Germany
Source: SLJ Macro Partners
Figure 3 compares how the individual member countries perform in response to shocks. The various demand and supply shocks for the other 10 countries are correlated with those in Germany, chosen as the ‘benchmark economy’. The analysis is confined to the last 15 years, to provide a measure of the impact of being within the euro. A correlation score of 1.0 would indicate that the country in question had an economy whose movements were perfectly synchronised with those of Germany, whereas a score of 0.0 would indicate that the movements of the two economies were completely random in respect of each other. A score of -1.0 indicates perfect ‘negative correlation’, i.e. that the other economy reacts in an exactly opposite way to Germany.
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If the euro were really bringing all of the participating countries ‘ever closer’ then the results for every country ought to fall in the top right-hand corner of Figure 3. However, the results are quite widely scattered. Eurozone members are not becoming ‘mini-Germanys.’
While the demand shocks for some of the Northern European economies still remain positively correlated to Germany (such as Austria, Belgium and Finland), for many peripheral countries, their demand shock correlations with Germany are very poor or negative (in particular, Spain Portugal and Greece). The average demand shock correlation with Germany is around 0.2. There is limited demand-cohesion between the individual member economies in the eurozone. The ‘average score’ for the eurozone is surprisingly close to the outcome that would result from a completely random sample of countries.
Percentage contributions to total exports in 2013
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The average supply shock correlation with Germany, interestingly, is around 0.4 and Italy is the only country exhibiting a negative supply shock correlation with Germany.
If the member countries of the EMU are becoming increasingly more divergent, responding to demand and supply shocks in very different or even opposite ways, then maintaining a single monetary policy becomes more challenging: how should the ECB react to shocks?
The implication of these findings is that adopting the euro has been accompanied by a divergence of the economies of the EMU-11. Furthermore, the degree of divergence has increased over time, and the start of this process can be traced back to the time that the euro was launched. These results are the exact opposite of what adopting the euro was meant to achieve. What was in theory a one-size-fits-all monetary regime has turned out in practice to be one-size-fits-none.
With the benefit of hindsight, and the findings of our study, it is now possible to resolve the academic arguments over the launch of the euro.
The argument that the euro would lead to convergence within the eurozone assumed, in essence, that it would encourage an ‘averaging out’ among the member states. There would be a single interest rate and exchange rate applying across each participating country. With a uniform base cost for capital, resources could be moved to exploit local pricing differences. Over time, competitive forces would cause those advantages to be ironed out as prices and other factors converged towards the mean. The end result would be a more integrated, single economy.
The argument that the euro would lead to d