Austria fixed its exchange rate to the DM from the mid-1970s and more tightly from the 1980s, although it entered the EU and the EMS only in 1995, and then EMU in 1999.
| Years | Targets and attainment | Classification |
| 1974-9 | informal participation in Snake (with wider, 4.5%, margins) and then in EMS, with particularly close relation to DM from July 1976; exchange rate as ‘cornerstone’ of monetary policy, whose instruments included bank lending controls, refinancing, OMOs and increasingly interest rates | loose exchange rate targeting LERT |
| 1980-98 | informal association till 1994 with EMS, with constant very-narrow-margin hard peg to DM; from 1995 formal member of EMS, continued very-narrow-margin hard peg to DM; monetary policy subordinate to exchange rate policy but operated via indirect instruments, primarily interest rates | full exchange rate targeting FERT |
| 1999-2017 | membership of European Monetary Union | currency union CU |
Selected IMF references: RED 1977 pp61-2; RED 1979 pp43-4, 61-2; SR 1979 pp5-6; RED 1982 pp25-7, 38-9; RED 1985 pp23-4; EDI 1993 pp13-14; EDI 1995 pp40-41; SR 1995 pp13-14.
Additional source: Houben (2000, especially pp197-8, 298-9).
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Monetary Policy Frameworks 