Also thanks to the efforts of UPDF, the districts of Lira and Soroti are now devoid of any LRA activity.

Also in July, UNICEF supported the drafting of inter agency guidelines for the care and protection of vulnerable and separated children within the framework provided by the district authorities in Lira.

Seventeen percentage points of this rise can be accounted for by higher inflation, and eight percentage points through a revaluation of the lira conducted prior to the introduction of the euro. Relative to Germany, Italy became a whopping 42 more expensive.

Instead, Europe developed the euro, which solved the problem of speculative attacks and monetary credibility by replacing individual currencies with a new one. It was impossible to short the lira or the franc because there were no more lire or francs.

CAMBRIDGE When Turkey s Justice and Development Party (AKP) defied pundits and pollsters by regaining a parliamentary majority in the country s general election on November 1, financial markets cheered. The next day, the Istanbul stock exchange rose by more than 5 , and the Turkish lira rallied.

The impact of exchange rate movements on inflation in most countries is thus 3 4 times larger than in the US. A 10 depreciation of the Turkish lira, for example, would raise cumulative CPI inflation by 1.65 2.03 percentage points, over two years, all else being equal.

The single currency was conceived as an answer to the upheavals of the postwar period double digit inflation, high unemployment, and speculative attacks on the pound, the lira, and the French franc. It was the crisis of the European Monetary System that drove the euro s launch on January 1, 1999.

Imagine that there was no euro and that the southern countries had retained their own currencies Italy with the lira, Spain with the peseta, Greece with the drachma, and so on. Would these countries today have an inflation profile more like the United States and Germany or more like Brazil and Turkey?

Sustainable growth can be achieved only if Italy s economy regains its competitiveness, and within the eurozone there is only one way to accomplish this by reducing the prices of its goods relative to those of its eurozone competitors. What Italy managed in the past by devaluing the lira must now be emulated through so called real depreciation.

They see how countries like Denmark that maintained their own currencies have been forced to raise interest rates to defend their exchange rates when the United States Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank are cutting interest rates. They see how, if there was still a lira or a peseta, they would be experiencing capital flight.

The irony here is that the impetus toward currency union was partly a result of the recognition of asymmetries. Thus, in the aftermath of the sterling and lira devaluations of the early 1990 s, with their resulting adverse trade shocks to France and Germany, the lesson that was drawn was that a single currency was needed to prevent such disparate shocks from recurring.