Monetary coordination among the gulf cooperation council countries

This paper assesses the desirability of coordinating monetary policies, both in general for a currency area and with particular reference to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. It discusses a number of important aspects of the functioning of the GCC economies, with a particular focus on factors that influence the money supplies of these economies. Some regression results are presented that provide insights on the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in the GCC countries and on the degree of similarity between their inflation and output tradeoffs, which is relevant to the successful functioning of a currency area.