An Economic History of the Euro analyzes the monetary cooperation and integration in Europe that led in 1999 to the launch of a single currency, and goes on to evaluate the euro’s first two decades, its achievements and challenges. The book’s analysis hinges on the problem of functional currency inequality and the efforts of Western European elites to overcome that inequality — first by restoring convertibility, then by stabilizing exchange rates, and finally, by creating a single currency that could surpass in quality the national currencies it replaced. Consequently, the book starts with the creation of the Bretton Woods international monetary system, which set the stage for the global dominance of the dollar that continues to this day.
Olga Butorina consulted numerous official documents and materials, as well as the scholarly works of both Russian and foreign authors. Many of the foreign-language sources are introduced into the corpus of Russian academic literature for the first time. The wide-ranging factual and statistical information provided aims to show how the processes of European monetary cooperation fit into the global context, also how they correlated with changing conceptual attitudes and the practice of economic policy. Considerable attention is paid to the eurozone crisis that began in 2010, to its causes, to assistance programs for the affected countries and the EU’s strategy for building a full-fledged Economic and Monetary Union.
For specialists in the field of international monetary, financial and economic relations; researchers; students and graduate students in economics.
