The excitement is mounting!
Announcement at the earliest, 1 pm CET or 12 London time.
Watch a live videocast of the announcement here.
My guess? Jagdish Bagwhati, perhaps with Paul Krugman.
(Entirely uninformed guess, would prefer Gordon Tullock but there we have it, my hostage to fortune.)
Update: Edmund Phelps. Good thing I don’t bet on my ideas, eh?
In
A Nobel Prize in economics? I don’t think so. Alfred had a bit more sense than that.
Edmund S Phelps it is. Can I go back to bed now?
$1.4M?
That’s not a prize – that’s a pools win!
The US taxes them on it, Martin.
The Nobel awarding committee for economics last visited the area of seminal contributions to “international economics” in 1999 when the laureate was awarded to Professor Robert Mundell (Columbia University) for his work on optimum currency areas:
http://www.columbia.edu/~ram15/eOCATAviv4.html
The rumour going the rounds for the last several years seems to be that the awarding committee won’t get around to visiting international economics again for some years yet.
The award made to Mundell in 1999 was at a time when political enthusiasms in Europe about the downstream benefits of European monetary union were more prevalent and (arguably) credible than currently.
Delors, who was EU Commission President at the time of the Maastricht Treaty (1991) which created the institutional framework for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in the EU, had this to say in an interview with the London Times in 2004:
“JACQUES DELORS, the former President of the European Commission, fuelled the controversy over the euro yesterday by admitting that Britain was justified in opting out of the single currency because its launch was flawed.
“In a remarkably frank interview with The Times, the one-time bogeyman of Eurosceptics also predicted that Britain would stay out for years, not least because Gordon Brown was so ‘passionate about his contempt for Europe’.
“In another startling admission, the veteran French leftwinger said that the European Union was in a ‘state of latent crisis’ because of weak leadership. He blamed member state leaders, including President Chirac of France, for putting national interests before the common good. . .
“But his most surprising comments were on the euro. He lamented that EU leaders had failed to heed his warning that monetary union must be matched with close co-ordination of economic policies, and argued that the euro was consequently less attractive than it could have been.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,740-967150,00.html
In January 1998, four German professors filed a petition at the country’s highest court in an attempt to delay the introduction of the euro, the single European Union currency planned to start on 1 January 1999 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/46673.stm
In February 1998, more than 150 German economics professors called for “an ‘orderly postponement’ of economic and monetary union because economic conditions in Europe are ‘most unsuitable’ for the project to start. The call to delay Emu ‘for a couple of years’ [was] made in a declaration signed by 155 university professors and sent to the Financial Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper . . It signals intensified opposition to the [German] government’s euro policy. . . ”
http://www.internetional.se/9802brdpr.htm
Post Script for the archive
Paul Krugman was unkind (unwise?) enough to write a critical piece about the downstream risks of adopting a single currency in Europe without political integration and a unified government:
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/euronote.html
Sadly, the attempt to set unified fiscal ground rules for Eurozone members with the Stability and Growth Pact of 1997 failed miserably through regular breaches of the set limit to budget deficits by the three largest members: Germany, France and Italy.
Whether Krugman’s scepticism prevailed with the Swedes or not, a national referendum held in Sweden on joining the Euro in 2003 rejected membership by 56% to 42%.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3110492.stm
They might consider themselves to have made the correct decision.
“The euro area, which in 2005 did not include any new member states, recorded an employment rate of 63.5 percent – even worse than the average in the EU-25. Good performers in 2005 were Denmark (75.9%), the Netherlands (73.2%), Sweden (72.5%) and the United Kingdom (71.7%).”
http://euobserver.com/9/22388/?rk=1
UK, Denmark and Sweden aren’t in the Eurozone. The interesting insight is that John Monks – who was Brendan Barber’s predecessor as TUC General Secretary – used to be a high-profile enthusiast for Britain joining the Euro. He is now based in Brussels as the General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation:
http://www.etuc.org/a/22
Readers may be interested in the seminal debate between the Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and Robert Mundell on fixed versus flexible exchange rates:
http://www.irpp.org/po/archive/may01/friedman.pdf
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