The sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone has rekindled the use of the North–South (core-periphery) terminology to refer to the heterogeneity of countries belonging to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). In the gold standard literature, this geographical partition had already been employed to oppose the fiscal profligacy and subsequent problems of convertibility of southern countries against the fiscal probity and long convertibility records of their northern counterparts. We provide statistical evidence that the group of countries that, with available data for 1870–1938, exhibited convertibility problems during the classical gold standard, for this reason called the pre-WWI “sometimes-floaters”, shared a pattern of fiscal dominance. This finding for the sometimes-floaters (southern European and South American countries plus Japan) differs from the non-fiscal dominance pattern that we obtain for the pre-WWI “never-floaters” (northern Europe and North America countries) when the Great War and its aftermath years are omitted. We also show that the presence of fiscal dominance was partly due to the lower levels of tax efficiency and political stability in the South.

欧元区的主权债务危机重新点燃了北-南（核心-外围）术语的使用，以指称经济及货币联盟（EMU）国家的异质性。在金本位制文献中，这种地域划分已经被用来反对财政挥霍和随后的南部国家可兑换性问题，反对它们与北方国家的财政信誉和长期可兑换记录。我们提供的统计证据表明，在1870年至1938年可获得的数据的国家组中，出于古典原因，这被称为第一次世界大战之前的“有时是浮动的”，在古典金本位制中表现出可兑换性问题，它们具有财政支配地位的模式。这一发现对于有时浮动的人（欧洲和南美国家以及日本）与第一次世界大战前“永不浮动的人”（北欧和北美国家）在大战时获得的非财政支配地位有所不同。及其遗留年限被省略。我们还表明，财政支配地位的存在部分是由于南方的税收效率和政治稳定水平较低。