Interest Groups and Monetary Integration

This book analyzes monetary integration and the choice and collapse of exchange rate regimes from a positive political economy perspective. This approach offers new insights to the widely discussed but only incompletely understood topic of exchange rate regime choice. A coherent framework is developed which challenges the traditional and normative theory of monetary integration by focusing on interest groups such as industries and bureaucracies to analyze how they influence policymakers and the outcome of economic policy. It is shown that European monetary integration in the last century and today, as well as monetary disintegration in the former Soviet Union, can be interpreted and understood in this perspective.