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Economic Integration and Macroeconomic Convergence in the Euro Area

In this paper I discuss various notions and aspects of integration and macroeconomic convergence, namely economic and monetary integration; real and nominal convergence. The EU has offered a great deal of information about the relation between all these types of integration and macroeconomic convergence. The EU has assumed that monetary integration is a precondition of deep economic integration and it has also assumed that the criteria to be adopted to converge to its own brand of economic and monetary union (EMU) are basically the same needed within the monetary union itself. Judging from the evidence of the first ten years of EMU, the actual relationship between real growth and inflation has turned out to be far from clear; and the paper provides a comparison between statistical evidence and the diverging predictions offered by two standard macroeconomic models.