An African monetary union worth watching

Member-countries will need to work much harder to come anywhere close to the integration they are visualising with the common currency project. It is an important milestone in world monetary history

The decade of 2010 could be described as belonging to the field of monetary economics. From the advent of bitcoin, which shaped the discussion on cryptocurrencies, to quantitative easing to negative interest rates, we have seen it all. What was once seen as unconventional monetary policy became conventional. At the very end of 2019, we saw another crucial development in monetary economics — the end of the CFA franc zone in select African countries and a shift to a common currency, the Eco. The common currency bit is not new, as we have the euro, but the ending of the