Integrating Europe's Financial Markets

Abstract

By and large, EU financial integration has been a success story. This book tracks the EU's journey along the path to a single financial market and identifies the challenges and priorities that remain ahead. The study takes an IMF perspective, focusing on two main imperatives: growth and economic integration, on the one hand, and financial stability, on the other. It follows the EU as it stepped up efforts to integrate its financial markets in the 1980s, aiming to develop a single modern financial market for the EU. The book looks at economic growth performance and progress in other areas toward the Treaty of Rome's single market objective. Particular attention is devoted to the interaction between financial integration and financial stability. This interaction presents the EU with a challenge, but also with the opportunity to play a pioneering role in developing a regional approach to financial stability that could become a model for the rest of the world.