15th Dubrovnik Economic conference symposium.

Wachtel, Paul ; Vujcic, Boris

The Croatian National Bank's 15th annual Dubrovnik Economic conference was held on 24-26 June 2009. The conference has a well established tradition for the presentation of research on a changing world economy and once again we are pleased to present some of the papers in this symposium. In this symposium we present three of the 10 research papers presented at the conference. All the papers were revised after the conference, refereed by anonymous reviewers and evaluated by the symposium editors. The papers in this symposium report on important research that addresses timely policy issues in monetary economics.

The first paper analyzes a most timely issue: the costs and benefits of Euro area membership for a small country. It draws lessons from the experiences of Ireland and was written by Patrick Honohan, currently the Governor of the central bank of Ireland. The second paper in the symposium, by Alex Cukierman of Tel Aviv University, poses an historical counterfactual question. He asks whether monetary policy and the path of inflation would have been different if Paul Volcker or Alan Greenspan had been leading the Fed in the 1970s. The final paper in the symposium is by Uwe Bower and Alessandro Turrini of the European Commission. They evaluate the impact of EU accession on the new member states.

The 15th Dubrovnik Economic Conference was organized by a scientific committee chaired by Zeljko Rohatinski, the Governor of the Croatian National Bank, and includes Boris Vujcic, Deputy Governor of the Croatian National Bank, Paul Wachtel, Professor of Economics at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University and Randall K. Filer, Professor of Economics at Hunter College of the City University of New York and at CERGE-EI, Prague. In addition, the success of the conference owes much to the efforts of Tomislav Presecan, Vice Governor of the Croatian National Bank and chairman of the organizing committee.

The full conference program and the papers not included in this symposium can be found on the Croatian National Bank web site (http://www.hnb.hr/). Conference papers benefited from comments from the conference discussants and participants. We are grateful to the anonymous referees and our discussants. The discussants in Dubrovnik were Joly Dixon, Randall Filer, Irina Ivaschenko, Evan Kraft, Ricardo Lago, Neven Mates, Dubravko Mihaljek, Marko Skreb, Vedran Sosic and Kresimir Zigic.

doi: 10.1057/ces.2010.8

PAUL WACHTEL (1) & BORIS VUJCIC (2)

(1) Stern School of Business, New York University, 44 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012-1126 USA. E-mail: Pwachtel@stern.nyu.edu

(2) Croatian National Bank, Trg hrvatskih vetikana 3, Zagreb 10002, Croatia.

E-mail: bvujcic@hnb.hr