Economics Essay 35: Joining the Euro

 Explain, using a diagram, how an EU member could stabilise its currency against the euro prior to joining the eurozone.

Stabilizing a currency against the euro prior to joining the eurozone involves maintaining a fixed or relatively stable exchange rate between the national currency of an EU member and the euro. Let's define the key terms involved:

1. Eurozone: The eurozone is a monetary union consisting of countries that have adopted the euro as their official currency. These countries share a common monetary policy, overseen by the European Central Bank (ECB), and have given up their national currencies in favor of the euro.

2. Exchange rate: The exchange rate is the value of one currency in terms of another. It represents the rate at which one currency can be exchanged for another. In this context, it refers to the rate at which the national currency of an EU member is converted into euros.

To stabilize its currency against the euro, an EU member can employ several measures:

1. Fixed exchange rate: The country can establish a fixed exchange rate regime, where its national currency is pegged directly to the euro at a specific exchange rate. This requires a commitment to maintain the fixed rate through active intervention in the foreign exchange market by the country's central bank.

2. Currency board arrangement: A currency board arrangement involves issuing a domestic currency that is fully backed by a reserve of euros. The domestic currency is issued at a fixed exchange rate, and the central bank commits to maintaining the fixed rate by holding adequate reserves of euros.

3. Monetary policy coordination: The EU member can align its monetary policy with that of the eurozone to maintain stability. This may involve adopting similar interest rate policies, inflation targets, or exchange rate policies that support the desired stability against the euro.

4. Capital controls: The country may implement capital controls to regulate the flow of capital in and out of the country. These controls can help manage speculative activities and reduce volatility in the exchange rate.

5. Macroeconomic policies: The EU member can pursue sound macroeconomic policies, such as fiscal discipline, maintaining price stability, and implementing structural reforms to improve the competitiveness of its economy. These policies contribute to maintaining confidence in the currency and its stability against the euro.

It is important to note that stabilizing the currency against the euro prior to joining the eurozone is typically a temporary measure. Once a country meets the necessary criteria and decides to adopt the euro as its currency, it will transition to the euro and no longer have an independent national currency.

Examples of countries that have stabilized their currencies against the euro prior to joining the eurozone include Bulgaria, which has employed a currency board arrangement, and Denmark, which maintains a fixed exchange rate within a narrow fluctuation band against the euro.

Overall, stabilizing a currency against the euro prior to joining the eurozone requires careful policy coordination, effective management of exchange rate mechanisms, and adherence to sound macroeconomic principles. It allows the country to establish a foundation of stability and credibility as it prepares for full integration into the eurozone.

Why footwork is overrated when keeping wicket

Deep Dasgupta in Cricinfo

I was recently asked for my opinion of Rishabh Pant's wicketkeeping. One of the things I spoke about then, apart from his good glovework, was how little he moved - which is the correct approach for English conditions. In general - and don't be shocked when I say this - footwork in keeping is overrated.

Don't get me wrong. Footwork is essential and an important facet of wicketkeeping, but the question is: how much and when should you move your feet? Since childhood I've been told about the importance of footwork and how good keepers never dive but rather just glide to the ball. "The less you dive, the better you are," I was told. That couldn't be further from the truth.

Like batting, with keeping too, it's your hands that will do the job. What footwork does is get you in good positions to catch or play the ball.

The problem with moving too much comes to light when the ball deviates from the predicted path - for example, when it takes an edge or if it changes direction after pitching, as it does when spin bowling is involved. If the keeper is on the move when the ball changes its predicted path, by the time he stabilises himself and reacts, it's often too late.

There are two critical phases when the keeper has to be stable - when the ball is pitching and when it is passing the bat. These are the two times when the ball is most likely to deviate. It is important to stay still, with a strong, stable base, at these times, to give yourself the best chance of reacting to likely changes.

Jos Buttler being dropped by Pant at Trent Bridge is an example of the keeper being on the move when the ball was edged. By the time Pant could stabilise and move, it was too late. (It was a tough chance, though.) If you take these two phases out, there isn't much time to move anyway, be it before the ball pitches or after it passes the bat.

The big argument for footwork is that it lets you cover a lot of ground. But how much ground does a keeper really need to cover for a seamer? On the off side, one would expect the keeper to reach till the first slip, and on the leg side a little bit more. First slip is about half a body length, so roughly one shuffling step away, or a dive. On the leg side, it's a step, then a dive - or another shuffling step or thereabouts. That is all the footwork the keeper needs. And that's all he will need, if he moves after the ball has passed the bat .Wriddhiman Saha's half-squat allows him remain stable and keep his eye on the ball Getty Images

Two of the best examples of not moving too much I can think of are MS Dhoni and Wriddhiman Saha. Against seamers, Saha doesn't squat fully. He stays still in a half-squat till the ball passes the bat. It is the same with Dhoni - his movements are minimal and his hand-eye coordination is among the best that I've seen. His keeping looks unorthodox but his basics are extremely good and solid: he stays still for as long as possible, keeps watching the ball till the last moment, and backs his hands to do the rest. At times, he and Saha catch the ball like outfielders, with one knee on the ground (or "long-barrier", in cricket parlance).

Another argument in favour of the keeper moving is the concept of catching the ball inside the body - that is, catching it between the body and the line of the stumps - promoted by a lot of coaches and pundits. This originated, if my memory serves me right, in Australia.

The carry and pace of Australian pitches means the keeper has substantially more time, because he is further back from the stumps, to take an extra step on either side. It's not the same on low and slow pitches, like you get in the subcontinent. The reason I'm not a big fan of catching the ball inside the body is that theoretically it sounds good but it isn't practical on most pitches. I must add, though, that I do encourage catching on either side of the body - just to make sure the hands have enough room to move.

Catching depends a lot on eye-hand coordination. The eyes are like cameras - the more you move, the more blurry the picture. For me, the best way to capture a moving ball is to stay still. The hands will catch what the eyes can see.

Though wicketkeeping is an important aspect of the game - and a tough one - unfortunately it does not get the attention that batting, bowling and fielding in general do. As long as the keeper is catching them, it's fine, but if it goes wrong, "his basics are wrong", as someone said to the media about me once. Sounds funny now but trust me, it wasn't at the time! Due to this lack of airtime in the public discourse for wicketkeeping, discussion of it remains somewhat caught in a quagmire of age-old clichés and half-baked knowledge. I would like to see more people getting involved in the conversation and delving deeper into the thankless job called wicketkeeping.

Of course Theresa May offers stability – just look at her unchanging positions on Brexit and general elections

Mark Steel in The Independent


The Conservative slogan for the election is “Strong and stable”. Because that’s the main thing we want from a government, strength and stability, like you get with Vladimir Putin.

Only idiots get obsessed with the details of what their leaders are strong and stable about, because the important thing is they’re strong while they’re doing it, and they keep doing it even if it’s insane.

Jeremy Corbyn should prove he can match their stability by burning down a public building at precisely half past nine every morning, and display his strength by punching people in the face as they run out the door screaming.

But this would barely touch the Government’s record of strength and stability. For example, every year since they took over in 2010, there has been a rise in the numbers dependent on food banks, going up every year, nice and stable, not haphazardly up one year and down the next so you don’t know where you stand. And weak governments might see hungry kids and feel a pang of conscience, but not this lot because they’re like sodding Iron Man.

George Osborne was so stable he missed every target he set, not just a few or 80 per cent, but every single one because business needs predictability, and when Osborne announced a target, our wealth creators could guarantee he’d come nowhere near it.

I expect they’ll also refer every day to their universal credit scheme, which is five years behind schedule and cost £16bn. You have to be strong to lose that amount and not care. Weak people would get to £3-4bn and think “Oh dear, maybe we should stop”, but not if you’re strong and stable.

The current Chancellor is nearly as impressive. After the Tories promised that under no circumstances would they raise National Insurance, Philip Hammond then raised National Insurance and cancelled raising it a few days later as it was so unpopular, exuding the sort of strength and stability that puts you in mind of Churchill.

Boris Johnson has exhibited the same values, displaying why we can trust him to stand up to dictators such as Syria’s President Assad. After one of Assad’s military victories, Boris wrote: “I cannot conceal my elation as the news comes in from Palmyra and it is reported that the Syrian army is genuinely back in control of the entire Unesco site… any sane person should feel a sense of satisfaction at what Assad’s troops have accomplished”, in an article headlined: “Bravo for Assad – he is a vile tyrant but he has saved Palmyra from [Isis]”.

Since then, the Foreign Secretary has steadfastly stuck with maximum stability to this view, with only the mildest amendment such as: “We must bomb Assad immediately; no sane person could ever wish him to control anything unless they’re a communist terrorist mugwump.”

What a model of stability, because most military experts agree it doesn’t really matter which side you’re on in a war, as long as you don’t compromise your strength or stability by not being in the war at all.

Then there was the Prime Minister’s line on not having an election, from which she hasn’t wavered one bit, and her insistence that we had to remain in the EU, which she’s adjusted a tiny bit to insisting we can only thrive outside the EU, but always either inside or outside, and never once has she suggested we must be somewhere else such as a split in the cosmos consisting of dark antimatter in which we can be both in and out of the EU due to time and space being governed by the European Court of Human Rights.

Thankfully the Labour Party is standing up to Conservative arguments with a dynamic campaign in which they explain how miserable everyone is.

The next party political broadcast will consist of Labour leaders walking through a shopping centre in Wolverhampton, pointing at people and saying: “Look at that bloke – utterly crestfallen. That’s a Tory government for you.”

It feels as if most people have already switched off in this election, so Labour’s best hope could be to answer questions by talking about an entirely different issue. So when Diane Abbott is asked whether Labour’s plans for education have been properly costed, she says, “I’m not sure. But I’ve been reading about koala bears. Did you know they’re not bears at all but marsupials, closer to the kangaroo?”

It doesn’t help that, as in any election, the Conservatives have much greater resources. If we lived in a proper democracy, these would be evened up.

Each newspaper would have to support a different party for each election, so The Daily Telegraph might support the Greens. And the letters column would read: “Dear Sir; with regard to current controversies concerning the use of television replays in Test match cricket, which jeopardise the ultimate authority of the umpire and therefore threaten the rule of law itself, it occurs to me the most sensible way to resolve these matters might be to renationalise the railways and install 40,000 wind turbines round Sussex. Yours sincerely, Sir Bartholomew Clutterbuck.”  

And if a wealthy businessman has money to donate to a party, the one it went to would be decided by lottery. So if Lord Bamford wants to contribute to society, he hands over £1m, then is thrilled to learn it’s gone to the Maoist Rastafarian Ban Fishing on Sundays Alliance.

The Conservatives would be delighted to give money to Maoists, because Mao was always strong and stable. You didn’t get him calling off a Great Leap Forward because he was offended by being called a mugwump. General Franco, Stalin, Ayatollah Khomeini – these are the strong and stable models to aspire to, not these weedy liberal Gandhi types, though Nelson Mandela might qualify as a figure of stability, as he kept to pretty much the same routine for 27 years.

The 'right school'? No, parents staying together is the best way to help children

Children with a stable home life do better at school. Focus less on catchment areas and more on relationship counselling

• 
• • Joanna Moorhead
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 18 December 2013 14.59 GMT

'The more stable a home life children have, the better they will be able to concentrate at school, and the better grades they will have.' Photograph: Eye Ubiquitous / Alamy/Alamy

Parents do anything they can to give their kids the best chance to succeed. According to a report published by the Sutton Trust, a third of "professional parents" with children aged between five and 16 have moved to an area because they think it has good schools, and 18% to a specific school's catchment area.

Some go further: 6% of the 1,000 parents surveyed admitted attending church services when they hadn't previously to help their children get a place at a church school; 3% admitted using a relative's address to get children into a particular school; and 2% said they had bought a second home and used that address to qualify for a place.

As well as a fair few white lies, it all adds up to a colossal amount of money spent on trying to improve your children's chances of doing better educationally – and the point the Sutton Trust wants to make is that the more money you have, the more you can do to "buy" an advantage. Its recommendation – that the government should step in and encourage ballots for school places, to make selection fairer – seems a good one. After all, the drive to make things as rosy as possible for your offspring is inherent in all us parents: it's what we're designed to do, to achieve the best possible life chances for our children. That doesn't, or shouldn't, amount to fraud – it's a braver person than me who would cast the first stone and condemn parents for trying to give their kids the best start.

So it seems strange that parents, while focusing so intently on school, seem often to ignore a much cheaper way of improving their children's educational lot. Because the more stable a home life children have, the better they will be able to concentrate at school, the better behaved they will be in school, and the better grades they will have on leaving school.

There's plenty of research to back all this up: a recent study by the Childhood Wellbeing Research Centre found that children aged seven and older tended to do more poorly in exams and to behave badly at school if their parents split up. Another report funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, released at the end of last year, found that a stable family life meant children were more likely to take in what's being offered in the classroom. According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, teenagers whose parents are fighting or separating may find it difficult to concentrate at school.

Of course, many marriages are completely on track, 100% hunky dory, and here the only thing worth stressing about is a school's Sats and GCSE results. But it may not be you, and I have to admit it's not me either: I've been married for more than a quarter of a century, and the one thing I'm sure of is that it's not a bed of roses. I've also got four children aged between 11 and 21; and while I'm truly grateful to the many teachers who have taught them, and the schools they've been pupils at, I've become more convinced as the years go by that a stable home is an absolutely vital ingredient in how they're getting on – and certainly much more crucial than where their school sits in the local league table.

So shelling out a few hundred quid for a course of Relate counselling sessions (and if you're on a low income, it can be a lot less, or even free) could be a much better use of the family's funds than spending thousands on moving house. Sure, your children might end up at a school whose exam results aren't quite so glowing – but that's more than offset by the fact that they are likely to do better for having happier parents (and moving house, after all, puts even more pressure on a relationship).

According to Relate, 80% of clients who went for adult relationship counselling said their partnership had been strengthened as a result. According to a whole pile of research stretching back across many decades, children tend to do best when they're raised in a stable family. I can't help wondering whether the only sure winners from the scramble to live by the best school gates are estate agents rather than the very children the move is designed to help.