With youth unemployment touching 50% in eurozone countries such as Spain and Greece, is a generation being sacrificed for the sake of a single currency that encompasses too diverse a group of countries to be sustainable?

What of Nobel Prize winner Robert Mundell’s famous 1961 conjecture that national and currency borders need not significantly overlap? In his provocative American Economic Review paper “A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas,” Mundell argued that as long as workers could move within a currency region to where the jobs were, the region could afford to forgo the equilibrating mechanism of exchange-rate adjustment.