A Review of Some of the Economic Contributions of Robert A. Mundell, Winner of the 1999 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

Introduction Robert Mundell richly deserves a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. His contributions to the field of international monetary economics were path breaking and have stood the test of time well. He chose his problems with great foresight and penetrating intuition, imagining economies with features like perfect capital mobility, floating exchange rates and supra-national currencies at a time when these assumptions would have seemed literally fantastic to most. His work remains extraordinarily influential among academics and policy-makers. As with many great scientists, Mundell’s contributions have been unevenly spread over his lifetime. From the late 1950s through the mid 1960s Mundell produced an astonishing crop of creative work that remains influential through the present day. Much of his most significant work was collected in his justly celebrated treatise International Economics, published in 1968. Three of Mundell’s achievements are particularly worthy of note. He single-handedly invented the concept of an optimum currency area, perhaps