Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Economics - Monetary theory and policy, grade: 2,0, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Schwerpunkt Geld- und Währung), course: Seminar topics in monetary economics, 25 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The intention of this paper is to discuss the alignment of the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) with the euro area. We tried to choose our alignment criteria in a way that is always referring to the consequences for a common monetary policy and the effects on transmission. Nevertheless, we have to emphasize that our intention is to give an overview how much the CEEC are aligned with the euro area; unfortunately we would oversize this paper by discussing the consequences of the observed developments for a common monetary policy in detail. We proceed as follows: First, we refer to the so-called Maastricht Criteria because they are a guideline for the decision whether a new member state is prepared to join the euro area and use the Euro as an official currency or not. We report graphs and figures of time series to illustrate developments. The results serve as a good starting point for deeper analyses and suggest some evidence for an alignment process that has taken place over the last years across the CEEC. Second, in order to gain a wider impression of the current state of alignment, we try to approach from another direction: We are making reference to the theory of optimum currency areas which will be briefly discussed. In the light of this approach, we continue with studying the alignment and present other criteria which seem to be appropriate – beside inflation rates, we focus on GDP, private consumption and unemployment – and are able to deliver important clues for our discussion. We provide some descriptive analyses including cross-correlation analyses of the time series we dealt with in this chapter. Unfortunately, there are developments in the time series we cannot explain sufficiently with our analyses done up to this point. For that reason we distinguish the GDP time series into the trend component and the cyclical behaviour for our observed countries as well as for the euro area. This is done by using a HP-filter implemented in Matlab. Afterwards, we are able to compare trend growth rates of the CEEC with the euro area and we can then do a correlation analysis of the cyclical components of the time series. Based on these findings, we briefly give an overview about some important articles dealing with the CEEC alignment and a comparison of the effects of the transmisthe European Union.