هل يشكل مجلس التعاون لدول الخليج العربية منطقة عملة مثلى؟

Abstract

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is an interesting Arab economic bloc, established in 1981; comprising of six countries of Arab peninsula .The GCC on its efforts to promote and deepen economic integration between the members took several decisive decisions in the last few years, the most important is designing 2010 as the year of launching the gulf common currency. This paper's focus is on examining whether these countries satisfy the criteria of optimum currency area theory (OCA), which were pioneered by Mundell (1961), Mckinnon (1963), kenen (1969), and others. Our results have showed that GCC has already fulfilled the majority of OCA Criteria with altering some of them and adding others as well. And this essential outcome deemed as a green light for GCC states to launch a monetary union phase. We divided the current paper into two main parts: in the first part, we discuss the important points of the OCA theory, and in the second one, we estimate empirically the OCA criteria in the light of GCC experiment.