Policymakers in the European Union drew two simple ideas from the recession of the early 1980s: i) that an initiative was needed if Europe wanted to escape self-fulfilling "Europessimism"; ii) that French-style, one-country reflation cum devaluation was both costly and inefficient. The results were the launching of the Single Market programme, together with the consensus in favour of nominal convergence within the European Monetary System.
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