ABSTRACT

The beginnings of the Portuguese Escudo Monetary Zone (EMZ) in 1961, to promote the economic integration of Portugal and its empire, coincide in time with Mundell’s seminal paper about optimum currency areas. If non-optimality was the cause of the EMZ’s demise, this would suggest that monetary unions are fragile achievements, with little prospect for survival. The EMZ turned out to be a short-lived experiment, with Angola and Mozambique building up large cumulative deficit positions offset by the sizeable cumulative surpluses of the mainland. A cobweb model using monthly observations for macroeconomic variables of these two territories describes a time divergent process caused by structural imbalances, as well as by the loan granting system. The EMZ was not an optimum currency area and was not sustainable in the long run. This is an historical experiment that is not without interest for the study of other monetary areas.

摘要

葡萄牙埃斯库多货币区 (EMZ) 于 1961 年成立，旨在促进葡萄牙及其帝国的经济一体化，恰逢蒙代尔关于最佳货币区的开创性论文。如果非最优是 EMZ 消亡的原因，这将表明货币联盟是脆弱的成果，几乎没有生存前景。EMZ 被证明是一个短暂的实验，安哥拉和莫桑比克建立了大量的累积赤字头寸，被大陆的大量累积盈余所抵消。使用每月观察这两个地区宏观经济变量的蜘蛛网模型描述了由结构失衡以及贷款发放系统引起的时间差异过程。EMZ 不是最佳货币区，从长远来看是不可持续的。