Monetary Policy in Southeast Europe on the Road to the Gold Standard

Since the establishment of the international gold standard at the end of the 19th century, the possibility of attaining monetary stability in peripheral countries has been increasingly associated with the decision to peg the currency to an external reference. By contrast, the monetary system adopted in Europe over the previous five centuries had assured stability through the articulation between an internal currency for domestic exchanges and an external currency for foreign trade. The object of this research is to study the coexistence of different standards in the early monetary history of modern Bulgaria as a peculiar way of passing from the dual currency system of pre-modern Europe to a uniform, national and international, all-purpose currency in the form of the gold standard. The broader goal is to enquire, in historical and comparative perspective, how different monetary regimes affect the degrees of freedom of monetary policy.