ABSTRACT
It is my view that the European project for arriving at economic and monetary union (EMU) should be regarded as the combined result of a radical change, since the late 1970s, in the principal economic policy objective of the major industrial countries—an epoch-making shift in emphasis away from underployment and poverty to the objective of reducing inflation; and of the theoretical restoration that has occurred over the last twenty years, with the revival of pre-Keynesian conceptions in macroeconomic thinking. This view, which I have discussed elsewhere (Pivetti 1993), makes it reasonable to believe also that the project’s fortunes will reflect developments in these two ambits. Specifically, one can sensibly expect the EMU project to be definitively abandoned as soon as the social impact of actual unemployment will again make the pursuit of its reduction each government’s main focus of concern, at the same time leading to a widespread rejection of the ‘natural’ rate concept of the economy.
