This book is the outcome of a conference, ‘Designing a Central Bank’, that was held on May first and second, 1991, at Georgetown University, and sponsored by the Centre for Economic Policy Research, the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University, and the International Monetary Fund. The conference was made possible by grants from the Commission of the European Communities under its SPES programme to support the CEPR's research programme on ‘Financial and Monetary Integration in Europe’, from the Ford and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations as part of their support for CEPR's International Macroeconomics programme, and from the government of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Center for German and European Studies.

The conferences also included a panel discussion on the problems of central bank design for EMU, which served as a progress report on the state of negotiations at the intergovernmental conference, and after dinner remarks presented by Michel Camdessus, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund.

We would like to thank Brad Billings of Georgetown University and his staff for organizing the conference, Kate Millward at CEPR for guiding the present volume to press, and John Black of the University of Exeter for his work as Production Editor.