France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain -Competitiveness in the Southern Euro Area (Electronic book text)

1. This collection of studies focuses on developments in the external competitiveness of five countries: France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain (hereafter five southern euro area countries or SEA-5 for short). As members of the EU and euro area, these countries share key institutional arrangements-notably their currency, exchange rate, and trade policy. Also, the challenges posed by globalization have been prominent in the debate among policymakers and observers-partly owing to conspicuous export market share losses, either across the board or in specific areas perceived as important. The studies, however, show that there is much diversity in these countries' economic trajectories. Indeed, these five economies were chosen, in part, to provide a sufficiently varied sample of experiences, contrasting two G-7 economies with countries where catch-up in the wake of EMU membership has played a crucial role-while maintaining the data volume manageable given the heavy use of disaggregated statistics in some of the studies.