Regional Characteristics, Monetary Union and Regional Income Volatility

Relatively little attention has been paid to the issue of how individual regions will fare as a consequence of the national decision on whether or not to adopt the single European currency. Regional welfare is influenced by both mean income and volatility. The present paper focuses on volatility. We develop a model of a regionally-integrated macroeconomy to explore how the income variance implied by the national decision on EMU is distributed across a country's regions. The model suggests that weaker regions are likely to do better than stronger regions with respect to volatility if the national economy participates in EMU