In the past 20 years, the European integration process has been mostly successful at establishing a single European market. However, no such success can be attributed to the establishment of an economic and monetary union. The recent financial and sovereign debt crisis dramatically exposed all the flaws and weaknesses of this ambitious project, which led the European Union into a deep economic and political crisis. In this context, the task of scholars and academics should be to explore new effective and efficient alternative in order to strengthen and create “a more perfect union”. On these premises and considerations, the present research will analyze the current legal framework of the European Monetary Union in order to assess and understand its success, and explore possible alternative institutional designs which could be more effective in achieving its objectives and, at the same time, be potentially more efficient and legittimate.
More in details, after examining in the first chapter, the origin and evolution of the economic and monetary integration from its very foundation, and, in the second chapter, the current legal structure of the economic union; the last and third chapter represents the normative claim of thesis. In an attempt to reconcile both law and economics, this normative part will involve a balancing exercise between the economic concepts of effectiveness and efficiency, and the legal concepts of legitimacy. The analysis will first understand and assess the effectiveness of the present governance structure. We will argue that the fundamental problem of the present governance structure is given by its many internal inconsistencies. On these premises, we will claim that it is possible to design an alternative regime which could potentially solve such issues and thus be more effective. The resulting three different alternative regimes will then be compared and evaluated in terms of their efficiency, according to the new institutional economics approach. The purpose of the efficiency evaluation is not to identify the single most efficient system of governance, but rather to understand the distinctive strenghts and weaknesses of the various alternatives in comparison with the current structure. Ultimately, the chapter will also evaluate the current EMU structure under a legitimacy standpoint. In particular, it will try to assess and understand whether these potentially more effective and efficient alternative arrangements would also improve the EMU under a legitimacy standpoint.