Comments

When I agreed to be a discussant of this paper, I had only the title in front of me, which referred to “international economic stability”. However, the text of the paper is concerned with international monetary stability. This term, however, is not defined in the paper. Surely if we are to discuss it we must have a way of identifying it and measuring it from observable data -of being able to say that the amount of it has increased or decreased since last year — unless indeed it is one of those phenomena once described by Fritz Machlup as being like a pretty girl: I can’t define the concept but I know one when I see one.