Discipline or external balance? The choice of international monetary systems in Europe

Jonas Ljungberg () and Anders Ögren
Additional contact information
Jonas Ljungberg: Department of Economic History, Lund University, Postal: Department of Economic History, Lund University, Box 7083, S-220 07 Lund, Sweden

No 190, Lund Papers in Economic History from Lund University, Department of Economic History

Abstract: While there is a huge literature on exchange rate systems since the classical gold standard, less research has been devoted to comparisons of the different arguments that guided the choices. While the origin of the international gold standard in the 1870s was a result of silver coins disappearing from circulation due to rising silver prices, the gold standard has later been interpreted as a quest for monetary discipline. This discipline argument was introduced by the end of WWI as a support for a restoration of the gold standard. Its failure led to an emphasis on the need to avoid external imbalances, which came to the fore in the preparations of the Bretton Woods system. The balance argument was also central in the early discussions of a monetary union in Europe, but with the critique of Keynesianism it was superseded by the disciplinary argument which became determinant for the design of EMU.

Keywords: exhange rates; Europe; gold standard; EMU (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B17 B27 F31 N13 N14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2019-02-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-his, nep-mon, nep-pay and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://lup.lub.lu.se/record/f6094e96-acf5-4eaf-a644-8f9fc0309097 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:luekhi:0190

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Lund Papers in Economic History from Lund University, Department of Economic History Department of Economic History, Lund University, Box 7083, S-220 07 Lund, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tobias Karlsson () and Benny Carlsson ().