Abstract:
Soon, euro area membership could more than double, with the vast majority of accession countries being quite different in economic terms compared with current members. Under the current decision-making system, this can lead to high decisionmaking costs and there is a risk that monetary policy could deviate from the targets specified in the Maastricht treaty. While centralization might be a first-best solution to these problems in many ways, there are possible disadvantages from a political economy perspective, including a potential conflict with the established voting rights of current euro area member countries. An alternative solution to ensure the European perspective of decision-making in the ECB Council is to match economic size and voting power. One way to implement this principle is a rotation scheme for national central bank governors that takes economic differences between the member countries into account. The paper discusses various rotation schemes, also with a view to the decision-making cost argument.
