Book Description

Research Paper from the year 2007 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Globalization, Political Economics, grade: 80%, University of Birmingham, course: International political economy, 34 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Some intellectuals, academics and financial leaders think that a global economy needs a global currency. They have proposed the abandonment exchange rates to advance the idea of a Global Monetary Union and ultimately a Single Global Currency. They argue that this would boost world prosperity, by eliminating transaction costs, currency risks, currency misalignments, and currency crises. (Bonpasse, 2006, p. 268) Opponents argue against monetary union and fixed exchange rates and favour flexible exchange rates, which they perceive as effective absorbers of asymmetric shocks in the economy. In this paper, I devote analysis to testing the analytical consistency and robustness of the utopian idea of a GMU, in terms of its desirability, utility and feasibility, thereby focusing on the political economy thus desirability of the issue. Having set the scene with a historical discussion of monetary orders as counterparts to the particular world order of a time and described the legislature of intrinsic flaws they have created, the argument is developed in these three stages. In Section I, I give reason for thinking that it makes economic and political sense to have common cents. I argue that a global monetary union is desirable, as it is a unique fusion of liberal ideals of economic freedom and utility combined with social democratic ideals of collective responsibility, which achieved on a global scale promises to create a monetary counterpart to a global regime that pursues a new development paradigm of integration rather than regulation and genuine global approaches to global problems. Section II, shows that political desirability is balanced by economic util