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Towards Improved Competitiveness Of The Economies Of The West African Economic And Monetary Union, E. O. Akinnifesi

CBN Occasional Papers

As is well known, a monetary union with a common currency confers on its members the advantage of fixed exchange rate and consequent relative price stability. While these advantages held sway up to the mid-1980s in the case of the seven member countries of the CEA franc zone in West Africa, the vulnerability of the zone to external shocks became manifest from the second half of the 1980s. Fairly persistent overvaluation of the CEA franc over time had weakened the competitiveness of the export sector leading to several economic problems including domestic and external debt arrears, capital flight, and negative …