ABSTRACT
Ronald McKinnon’s papers on the subject of world-wide monetary policy coordination and exchange-rate stabilisation contain several key elements of which a German central banker can take a positive view. The basic analytical foundations of his writings - a Friedman-type global version of empirical monetarism - are not too far apart from the thinking of those central bankers who have adopted a position of pragmatic monetarism during the past ten years. McKinnon adheres to the widely-accepted traditional monetarist tenet that inflation can, at least in the longer run, essentially be regarded as a monetary phenomenon and therefore prefers non-discretionary monetary policies, with leading central banks, as a group, assuming the task to stabilise the world price level.
