The Cost and Benefits of a Swedish EMU Membership : An analysis of the consequences for Sweden to had opted out of the European Monetary Union

Sammanfattning: The 2008/2009 world financial crisis, as well as the 2010 onwards European sovereign debt crisis, retriggered the debate on costs and benefits of a European Monetary Union membership. This thesis examines whether Sweden experienced net costs or benefits in opting out the EMU, especially in comparison to Finland due to the close link between both economies, as well as cultural and geographical similarities. While both countries were drawing a convergent economic path from the 1990’s, in 1999, with the Euro adoption in Finland, the two Scandinavian economies chose different tracks in terms of monetary policies. Sweden opted to remain outside the EMU and maintain the floating exchange rate and the control of domestic monetary issues, while Finland chose to relinquish monetary policy autonomy and started to follow the rules and constraints of the European Central Bank. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the economic development of UK in comparison with France, due to the approximate size of both economies (one EMU member and the other an outsider), and also Germany, the EMU leader, and the Euro area as a whole. The data base from Eurostat and the Synthetic Counterfactual Method have shown that there were net benefits for Sweden not to had joined the EMU. Moreover, the paper presents the Theory of Optimum Currency Area, first introduced by Mundell in 1961 as the starting point on the discussion of costs and benefits of an EMU membership.