Today is the 10th anniversary of the agreement that launched the single currency. However, residents of the first 12 EU states that adopted the Euro didn’t begin using Euro banknotes and coins until 1 January, 2002.
When the euro was launched there were plenty of people who thought it would crash and burn. Ten years on, its role as a global currency is secure, even if it hasn’t achieved everything its founders hoped such as higher living standards (per capita income) and less divergence between national economies. But it has achieved macroeconomic stability and financial stability when reflecting to the recent credit crunch.
There are now 15 European countries who are members of the Eurozone, with a common currency, the Euro, and a single interest rate set by the European Central Bank (ECB). They make up 72% of the EU’s GDP. Click here for the Eurozone in figures.
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The International Monetary Fund has come out with its latest set of forecasts of the world economy. The report says at one point:
“The IMF staff now sees a 25 percent chance that global growth will drop to 3 percent or less in 2008 and 2009—equivalent to a global recession.”
Since when is 3% growth equivalent to a “global recession”? According to my textbook, periods of negative GDP growth are called recessions.
By this “new’ definition, the world economy has been in recession 1980-83, 1990-93, 1998, and 2001-2002. In other words, 11 out of the last 28 years. There are no negative years of world growth.
Here are the IMF’s latest world growth numbers, and forecasts out to 2013.
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On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, a new report from Oil Change International, entitled A Climate of War (pdf) quantifies both the greenhouse gas emissions of the Iraq War and the opportunity costs involved in fighting war rather than climate change. At the webpage A Climate of War at oil Change you can find some facts on the war and warming.
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Today is the 10th anniversary of the agreement that launched the single currency. However, residents of the first 12 EU states that adopted the Euro didn’t begin using Euro banknotes and coins until 1 January, 2002.
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