Financial integration in East Asia is actively being pursued and will in due course lead to substantial mobility of capital between economies in the region. Plans for monetary cooperation as a prelude to monetary integration and ultimately monetary unification are also proposed. These plans often suggest that central banks should adopt some form of common exchange rate policy in the transition period towards full monetary union. This paper argues that this is a dangerous path in the context of highly integrated financial markets. An alternative approach is proposed where independent central banks coordinate their monetary policies through the adoption of common objectives and by building an appropriate institutional framework. When this coordination process has progressed to the point where interest rate developments are similar across the region, and if in the meantime the required institutional infrastructure has been build, the next step towards monetary unification can be taken among those central banks that so desire. The claim is that this transition path is likely to be robust and will limit the risk of currency crises.

This paper develops a structural macroeconometric model of the world economy, disaggregated into thirty five national economies. This panel unobserved components model features a monetary transmission mechanism, a fiscal transmission mechanism, and extensive macrofinancial linkages, both within and across economies. A variety of monetary policy analysis, fiscal policy analysis, spillover analysis, and forecasting applications of the estimated model are demonstrated, based on a Bayesian framework for conditioning on judgment.

We compute government spending multipliers for the Euro Area (EA) contingent on the interestgrowth differential, the so-called r-g. Whether the fiscal shock occurs when r-g is positive or negative matters for the size of the multiplier. Median estimates vary conditional on the specification, but the difference between multipliers in the negative and positive r-g regimes differs systematically from zero with very high probability. Over the medium run (5 years), median cumulated multipliers range between 1.22 and 1.77 when r-g is negative, and between 0.51 and 1.26 when r-g is positive. We show that the results are not driven by the state of the business cycle, the monetary policy stance, or the level of government debt, and that the multiplier is inversely correlated with r-g. The calculations are based on the estimates of a factor-augmented interacted panel vector-autoregressive model. The econometric approach deals with several technical problems highlighted in the empirical macroeconomic literature, including the issues of fiscal foresight and limited information.