The adoption of a common central Bank has modified the strategic
relationships between fiscal and monetary authorities and raised in a new
context the issue of debt stabilization. To study this problem, Van Aarle
et al (1997) have proposed a two-country model with a
common central bank. In a sense they obtained a neutrality result: the
adoption of a common central bank does not modify the evolution of debt if
the authorities can commit. This note reexamines this neutrality result by
departing from the previous authors on three points: i) externalities are
introduced between countries to account for the elasticity of the world
interest rate to macro-economic policies, ii) the model features
n countries, some of them remaining outside the monetary
Union, iii) analytical results are given (many results of Van Aarle
et al (1997) were numeric). In this extended context the
neutrality result collapses: i) the institutional change introduces an
asymmetry between countries, ii) countries inside the monetary union improve
their long run welfare, iii) but the outside countries can win or lose under
the new institutional setting.