Title: European Economic Community, by Barry Eichengreen: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics | Library of Economics and Liberty
Headings: 
Origins
Development
The Single Market Program
Monetary Unification

Content: Remaining barriers to the movement of capital and labor across the EC's internal frontiers will be removed. EC residents will be able to shift their funds from one country to another without having to worry about capital controls, and will be able to work in another member country without having to secure a work permit or obtain local technical accreditation. National tax codes will be harmonized to simplify economic decision making. Economic analyses suggest that the benefits are likely to be considerably larger than those derived from the customs union alone. The downside, however, is that regulation may well become more oppressive because the influence of intercountry competition, which tends to discourage costly regulation, is eliminated. Similarly, the harmonization of tax policy will prevent footloose factors of production (i.e., labor and capital) from fleeing to low-tax jurisdictions, thus removing an important constraint on spending by national governments. Monetary Unification
In 1988, with European integration gathering momentum, the governments of the EC member states appointed a committee, chaired by Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, to study the feasibility of complementing the single market with a single currency. After the Delors Report appeared, the EC governments appointed an Intergovernmental Conference to prepare amendments to the Treaty of Rome. The proposed amendments—the Treaty on Economic and Monetary Union—were presented at the Dutch town of Maastricht in December 1991. The Maastricht Treaty proposes replacing the EC's twelve national currencies with a single currency and creating a European Central Bank (ECB).