optimum currency area

optimum currency area, a currency area in which the benefits of using a common currency outweigh the costs of individual economies’ giving up their own currencies. Economies form a currency area if they use the same legal tender or have their exchange rates irrevocably fixed. An optimum currency area (OCA) is a theoretical notion.

The literature on the benefits and costs of OCAs flourished until about the mid-1970s and then fell into oblivion. European monetary integration led to a renaissance of OCA theory, culminating in Canadian-born economist Robert A. Mundell’s winning the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1999—the same year that the euro was introduced as a noncash monetary unit. Mundell framed the problem of forming a currency area in purely economic terms: it amounts to a cost-benefit analysis of irrevocably fixing the exchange rate. Countries that form a currency area lose, on the one hand, the exchange rate as a presumably effective instrument of adjustment to shocks that affect those economies differently. On the other hand, the member countries of a currency area benefit from lower transaction costs of switching between currencies. The optimum size is reached when the loss from higher adjustment costs are equal to the gains from using fewer currencies.

The benefits of lower currency transaction costs were straightforward and did not arouse much interest, while the determinants of rising adjustment costs became an ever-longer list. Increasing adjustment costs are of less concern, first, if shocks affect the countries or regions in similar ways so that a devaluation or revaluation of the exchange rate would not help. This is the case if the countries in question have a diversified or a similar economic structure. If shocks are asymmetric, however, the costs of forming a currency area can still be manageable if, second, other adjustment instruments can substitute for the exchange rate. Those other adjustment mechanisms—or “OCA criteria,” as they are called by scholars in the field—comprise labour mobility and to a lesser degree capital mobility, flexible prices or monetary wages, and fiscal federalism. Whenever a member of the currency area suffers more from unemployment or inflation as a consequence of a shock, those market mechanisms or government policies would replace exchange-rate changes that otherwise could have led to rising employment (devaluation) or the easing of price pressures (revaluation).

No existing currency area is “optimal” in the sense of OCA theory, because none has ever been determined by equating macroeconomic costs and microeconomic benefits. The renaissance of the OCA theory in the 1980s was all the more remarkable, as two developments in economics had questioned two basic assumptions of OCA theory. First, modern conceptualizations of the exchange rate raised doubts in regard to the effectiveness of the exchange rate as a reliable and effective adjustment instrument. In fact, the occurrence of self-fulfilling currency attacks implied that there was no such thing as an irrevocably fixed exchange rate. Second, new approaches to economic methodology suggested that evaluating the various OCA criteria prior to the creation of a currency area suffers from a fundamental flaw. According to the so-called Lucas critique (developed by the American economist Robert Lucas), rational economic agents anticipate and respond to policies; their behaviour, and therefore the “structure” of markets, cannot be taken as given. This implies that the OCA criteria will change with monetary integration itself and cannot be evaluated before it has taken place.

This latter insight is the core of the “new” theory of optimum currency areas. It explores, for instance, whether economic structures converge or diverge owing to intensified trade and increasing competition that comes with more price transparency. In theory, this could give rise to a paradox: if the member economies become more specialized and thus more susceptible to asymmetric shocks, a currency union that satisfied the OCA criteria prior the union’s creation may then become suboptimal for the very reason that it has been formed.

Politicians were keen to draw from the insights of the new OCA theory, and they arguably were what gave this rather simplistic economic theory a new lease on life in the late 1980s when European monetary integration was conceived. If structural characteristics of member countries change with monetary integration, policymakers could argue that labour markets had to become more adjustable and prices and wages more flexible because there would no longer be an exchange rate that could be devalued in order to compensate a loss in competitiveness. The evaluation criteria for an optimum currency area can thus be presented as norms for the currency area to be formed. Such a perspective turns the original argument on its head. It allowed making an economic case for stirring up the corporatist arrangements in many European member states that were held responsible for high unemployment since the 1970s.

However, the theory did not prepare governments for the intricacies of central banking and policy coordination in a monetary union without fiscal federalism. This suggests that the popularity of OCA theory had less to do with its sound economic argument than with its political use.