Rejoinder to the comments on: “It Can’t Happen, It’s a Bad Idea, It Won’t Last. U.S. Economists on the EMU and the Euro, 1989—2002.”

In Jonung and Drea (2010) we surveyed the evolution of the views of U.S. economists on European monetary unification from the publication of the Delors Report in 1989 to the introduction of euro notes and coins in January 2002. Here we provide our response to the nine commentators to our paper. We stress that almost all of the commentators share our conclusion that the use of the theory of optimum currency area to evaluate the European plans for a monetary union was a major source of U.S. academic pessimism towards the single currency for it led economists to ignore the political dimension of the European integration process. We note that some of the U.S. economists who took part in the debate in the 1990s now are back commenting on the present challenges facing the euro.

Link to January 2010 article “It Can’t Happen, It’s a Bad Idea, It Won’t Last. U.S. Economists on the EMU and the Euro, 1989—2002.”