Limits of Surveillance and Financial Market Failure

The Euro-area crisis, which erupted only a few years after the outbreak of the global financial and economic crisis, revealed weaknesses in regional as well as global frameworks for financial and economic crisis prevention. In fact, neither regional surveillance within the European framework nor global surveillance by international institutions such as the IMF and the OECD was effective in preventing such large-scale crises in developed countries. Can more effective surveillance be put in place to prevent their recurrence? In this book, first-class economists with rich experience in economic and financial policy-making address a broad range of difficult policy issues. They examine the roles of surveillance by international institutions as well as micro- and macro-prudential policies, their mixes and their coordination with monetary policies for achieving financial stability while promoting better macroeconomic performance. Based on this analysis, the book also examines economic as well as political forces at work in order to understand the dynamics of the Euro-area crisis that erupted only a few years after the outbreak of the global financial and economic crisis. It reveals that the crisis was actually balance-of-payments induced, deriving from single-currency tensions as well as excessive sovereign debt. It emphases that the sustainability of the Euro area crucially depends on structural reform in both surplus and deficit countries within the area to promote convergence of economic performance.