For a moment, I want to go back to research on the economic arguments for – and against creating a monetary union. In the 1960s, a group of researchers – following the pioneering contributions of Mundell, Kenen and McKinnon started posing a crucial question: from a purely economic point of view, what is the optimal area for a single currency?
The Optimum Currency Area (OCA) theory that ensued is well-known to you all and I don’t have to say much about it. It is not easy to summarise the many views on the euro area as an OCA, or to sum up the vast volume of empirical studies of all OCA criteria for European countries.