La convergence est-elle nécessaire à la création d’une zone monétaire ? Réflexions sur l’étalon or 1880-1914

The Maastricht Treaty has emphasised that « convergence » criteria were holy principles for a successful completion of monetary unification. From this respect, the experience of the «classical» gold standard of the late nineteenth century might have interesting lessons for us, because convergence under the gold standard took place out of any formal framework, and yet it was a success. This paper is a first interim report in a research program aimed at building a number of long term series for public debts, public finance, inflation rates, interest rates, and exchange rates for a large sample of European countries (France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Great-Britain, Greece, Holland, the Austrian Empire, Russia, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Denmark) and over the period 1 880-1 91 3, in order to assess the causes of the stability of the gold standard. While the broader project is far from being completed, we seek here to provide a number of provisory conclusions and research hypotheses that could be very relevant for contemporary debates.