NBER Working Paper No. 23220
Issued in March 2017
NBER Program(s): DAE ME
The recent Eurozone crisis of 2010-2013 has brought to the fore the argument that a successful monetary union needs to be combined with a fiscal union. The history of the U.S. monetary/fiscal union is often given as a template for Europe. In this paper we describe how the push towards creation of the American fiscal union was long and arduous—it took from 1790 to the mid 1930s. In the European case, unlike the U.S. story, there is strong opposition to creating a fiscal union because members fear the loss of sovereignty that is entailed.