Flexibility versus Stability – A difficult tradeoff in the Eurozone

Since the eruption of the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone, substantial efforts have been made to create a new form of governance for the Eurozone that will make the monetary union more robust in absorbing future economic and financial shocks. Much of the drive to adapt the governance of the Eurozone has been influenced by the traditional theory of optimal currency areas (OCA), which stresses the need for flexibility in product and labour markets.

As a result, the Eurozone countries have been pushed towards structural reforms that aim to reduce the structural rigidities in product and labour markets. In this paper we ask whether this movement towards structural reform as part of the push for new governance is really going in the right direction. We will argue that this is not the case. The main reason is that the nature of the shocks that have hit the Eurozone does not correspond to the pattern of asymmetric shocks that has been identified by the OCA theory to require more flexibility. We will argue that what is needed in the Eurozone is not more structural reforms but a better mechanism capable of dealing with the classical boom and bust dynamics that are inherent to capitalism.

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