The Challenges of German Unification for EC Policymaking and Performance
分析德国经济货币联盟对欧洲一体化进程的影响，利用1990年后的统计数据评估其政策后果，并探讨从中央计划经济向市场经济转型的成本与教训。
Rarely have economists been treated to an experiment comparable to the one of German reunification. In less than a year, a single political and entity is being fused from two economies with fundamentally different underlying principles of organization and substantially different levels of development. (See Horst Siebert, 1990, and David Begg et al., 1990.) Nonetheless, major regional disparities between western and eastern Germany (what were the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and German Democratic Republic (GDR)) will undoubtedly continue for many years. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, both German Monetary Union (GMU) and political reunification were realized on July 1 and October 3, 1990, respectively. In this process, the advice of economists was often ignored in favor of political imperatives (see Roland Vaubel, 1990). Concerned with the potential impact of German Economic and Monetary Union (GEMU) on the process of European and political integration, many European Community (EC) policymakers have perceived German reunification as adding impetus to the 1992 program. Nonetheless, such initial reactions to GEMU have generally been formulated with only fragmentary information regarding the subsequent costs and policy measures, necessitated by the real resource transfer in order to achieve the German government's stated objective of equalizing living standards between western and eastern Germany. To the extent that GEMU generates positive or negative spillover effects to other EC countries, it presents challenges that can potentially influence the speed and degree of European integration. This paper examines implications of GEMU for the European integration process. In so doing, it makes reference to the burgeoning literature on the consequences of German reunification. Consideration of statistical information related to the performance of eastern and western Germany since June 1990 permits some evaluation of the validity of certain hypotheses underlying earlier studies of GEMU, as well as an assessment of likely consequences for EC policymaking and performance. Nonetheless, it is contended that the most provocative implications of GEMU result from the specific case it provides for analyzing the costs involved in integrating the fundamentally different centrally planned economies (CPE) of Eastern Europe within a viable European economic space. In this sense, the German reunification experiment offers not only the remarkable opportunity to measure the costs associated with the total reorganization and restructuring of a CPE to a free-market economy, but also to assess the contribution of government policy measures in this conversion process. Yet, certain unique characteristics of GEMU limit the validity of lessons from the German experience for understanding the adjustment processes in other Eastern European economies.