Leading Indicators of Currency Crises: Are They the Same in Different Exchange Rate Regimes?

We investigate whether leading indicators of currency crises differ across exchange rate regimes using data for 88 countries in the period 1981–2010. Our estimates suggest that in fixed exchange rate regimes external indicators, such as deviations of the real exchange rate from trend and the growth of international reserves, have the strongest predictive power. In contrast, in floating exchange rate regimes monetary policy and credibility indicators, such as domestic credit growth and inflation, are the best leading indicators of currency crises. Both credibility and external economic indicators have predictive power in intermediate exchange rate regimes.     

Why clashes between internal and external stability goals end in currency crises, 1797–1994

We argue that recent currency crises reflect clashes between fundamentals and pegged exchange rates, just as did crises in the past. We reject the view that crises reflect self-fulfilling prophecies that are not closely related to measured fundamentals. Doubts about the timing of a market attack on a currency are less important than the fact that it is bound to happen if a government's policies are inconsistent with pegged exchange rates. We base these conclusions on a review of currency crises in the historical record under metallic monetary regimes and of crises post-World War II under Bretton Woods, and since, in European and Latin American pegged exchange rate regimes.     

Substitution Monétaire dans les Pays Africains

The practice of currency substitution in developing countries in general, and in sub‐Saharan countries in particular, differs from what obtains in industrialized countries. Whereas in developed countries currency substitution is chiefly as a result of diversified port folios, in third world countries, the phenomenon arises from the neglect of the national currency by economic operators. This article aims first to study the various aspects of currency substitution in Africa based on the functions of money and, secondly, to access the consequences of this phenomenon on the economic policies governments intend to implement. After observing that currency substitution exists in Africa for varied reasons, such as paucity of payment instruments, high inflation rates, low effective interest rates, the weakness of a new currency, exchange rate fluctuations and so on, the most serious of which is capital flight, we have come to the conclusion that this practice seriously undermines the success of the envisioned monetary and/or budgetary policies of these countries.     

Optimal Exchange Intervention in an Inflation Targeting Regime: Some Cautionary Tales

Devaluations and fiscal retrenchments coming from developed countries are buffeting less developed countries. Many emerging market countries have adopted inflation targeting as “best practice,” but now they are being advised to enhance their inflation targeting regimes with foreign exchange intervention. Here we use a DSGE model to tell some cautionary tales about this advice. A Taylor rule guides interest rate setting, while foreign exchange interventions are used as a second tool of monetary policy. These interventions are effective in our model since domestic and key currency bonds are imperfect substitutes. We derive optimal (Ramsey) intervention policies in response to foreign devaluations and fiscal retrenchments, and find that they are rather complex. So, we compare the optimal responses to policies that simply smooth real or nominal exchange rate movements. Our results suggest that discretion may be the better part of valor: pure inflation targeting may come closer to the optimal policy than exchange rate smoothing. A secondary result may also be of some interest: foreign exchange interventions have a stronger impact on inflation and output in an inflation targeting regime than do sterilized interventions; the Taylor rule augments the effects of a given intervention.     

Monetary autonomy in selected Asian economies: The role of international reserves

With the increased financial integration of Asian countries, monetary policy takes on the additional role of maintaining the stability of the financial system along with the traditional objectives of promoting growth and employment with price stability. Given the importance and relevance of monetary policy in Asian countries, we examine monetary autonomy and its interaction with financial integration, currency regimes and international reserves for the past two decades in the following Asian countries: Thailand, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, and India. The empirical analysis reveals two significant and interesting findings that have policy implications. First, Thailand, Korea and Indonesia, countries that have moved towards a floating currency regime, experienced simultaneous declines in the sensitivity of their interest rates (thereby increasing monetary autonomy), while India continues to increase the sensitivity of its interest rates with a pegged exchange rate and increased financial integration. Second, in all of the studied economies, the accumulation of international reserves has contributed, to some extent, to the retention of monetary autonomy in terms of preventing the sensitivity of the interest rates from rising. We speculate that the accumulation of reserves plays the role of an anchor for monetary autonomy in emerging market economies facing a “fear of floating”.     

Terms of Trade Shocks and Inflation Targeting in Emerging Market Economies

Emerging market economies (EMEs) have persistently experienced different waves of commodity terms of trade disturbances, generating macroeconomic instabilities. The adoption of inflation targeting (IT) by many EMEs has raised questions about its relative suitability in dealing with these shocks compared with other monetary policy regimes. This paper tests the robustness of IT compared with monetary targeting and exchange rate targeting regimes in coping with commodity terms of trade shocks using the panel vector autoregressive technique. The results show that in general, IT countries respond better to commodity terms of trade shocks especially with respect to inflation and output gap. However, exchange rates are more volatile in IT countries than in exchange rate targeting countries. The results suggest that EME countries can reduce the adverse effects of commodity terms of trade fluctuations when they adopt IT, but they also need to pay attention to exchange rate movements.     

我国货币政策对房地产价格的非线性效应分析-基于MS - VAR模型的实证分析

通过建立三区制下的MSVAR模型,研究了货币量、市场利率、信贷余额和汇率对房地产价格的非线性影响。研究表明：各经济时期的区制转移特征明显,而扩张性的货币政策比收缩性货币政策更难发挥效果。经济扩张期下,利率政策能较好抑制房价;经济稳定期下货币供应量的稳定房价效果最好;而经济衰退期下前两种措施均失效,信贷渠道能发挥更大的作用。     

Exchange rate policy in the pacific: an evaluation of currency basket regimes

The Pacific island countries have opted for exchange rate regimes with varying degrees of flexibility. Whereas several microstates have adopted an external currency as their legal tender, others have decided to use a basket currency, and yet others have chosen a managed float. The choice of exchange rate regime can have far reaching economic consequences. In the paper, we study the basket currency arrangements by Fiji, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, and Tonga. We first build a new four‐country exchange rate model that illustrates how monetary authorities should best determine the weights of the basket currencies given certain macroeconomic objective functions. In this model, we explicitly include tourism flows. In the second part of the paper, we estimate the de facto weights of foreign currencies in the currency basket of the four countries. We show how the composition has changed amid the global financial crisis. Finally, we demonstrate that the current weights are not optimal compared with the predictions of our model.     

Post-crisis monetary and exchange rate policies in Indonesia,Malaysia and Thailands

This paper surveys the post-crisis monetary and exchange rate policies of Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. Malaysia has pegged the ringgit while Indonesia and Thailand have adopted heavily managed exchange rates. Under their IMF programs, Thailand and Indonesia set base money targets, but Thailand has moved, and Indonesia is now moving, to inflation targeting, using interest rates as the short-term instrument. Malaysia also sets interest rates. The ability of the three central banks to set interest rates and also pursue an exchange rate target with an interest rate target has been bolstered by restrictions on the internationalisation of the domestic currency. The three central banks have also had to sterilise the monetary effects of their foreign exchange interventions. It is argued that inflation targeting is now a good policy choice, but that a more freely floating exchange rate would be better than sterilisation of balance of payments surpluses or deficits.     

International monetary transmission in East Asia: Floaters,non-floaters,and capital controls

This paper analyzes the impacts of the United States (US) monetary shocks on East Asian countries using structural vector-autoregression (VAR) model. We find that the impacts of the US monetary shocks on East Asian domestic interest rates and exchange rates contradict conventional wisdom. The conventional exchange rate channel is unlikely to play much role in the transmission of the US monetary policy shocks to floaters in East Asian countries, excluding Japan. In these countries, the domestic interest rates respond strongly to the US interest rate changes, by giving up monetary autonomy, probably because of fear of floating. However, the domestic interest rate does not respond much in countries with fixed exchange rate regimes and capital account restrictions, such as China and Malaysia. This may suggest that the countries with fixed exchange rate regimes enjoy a higher degree of monetary autonomy, most likely with the help of capital account restrictions.     

Generalized purchasing power parity and the case of the European Union as a successful currency area

This article uses multicountry purchasing power parity (PPP) tests to study the success of the European monetary system (EMS) in creating a successful currency area for a stable European monetary union. If the EMS has sufficiently integrated the fundamentals within the European Union, then real exchange rates between member countries will share a common stationary trend when denominated by a common outside currency. Previous research using two-country PPP tests have been inadequate in explaining the nonstationary nature of real exchange rates between the EMS countries and nonmember countries. The use of generalized PPP tests can show that even though individual exchange rates within the EMS may appear to be nonstationary with respect to outside countries, some of them will combine to form a currency union with a stable stationary trend.     

Proposal for a common currency among rich democracies

This paper proposes the creation of a common currency for the industrialized democracies, notably the United States, the European Union, and Japan. A common currency implies a common monetary policy; institutional arrangements for which are discussed. The rationale rests on the assumption that asymmetrical financial shocks will become more important than asymmetrical real shocks for these large, diversified economies, and that one of the growing sources of financial shocks will be changing expectations about exchange rate movements among national currencies. These financial shocks will in turn disturb real economies, such that flexible exchange rates among major currencies will increasingly become sources of shock more than shock absorbers. Such a common currency would also make it much easier for emerging markets to frame their monetary and exchange rate policies.     

Fixed Exchange Rates and Disinflation in Emerging Markets: How Large Is the Effect?

We examine developing countries which have institutional quality ratings for the effects of exchange rate rigidity on inflation. The level of institutional development exerts no effect on the impact of currency regimes. However, the interaction of institutional quality and exchange rates has, in the most plausible specifications, a negative impact on inflation. This suggests that fixed exchange rates exert at most a contingent effect on inflation, and indicates that countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America contemplating currency pegs would be better off improving institutional quality prior to adopting the euro or dollar and expecting a large subsequent disinflationary effect. JEL no.  F31, O11     

Should East Asia’s currencies be pegged to the yen? The role of invoice currency

Growing concern that a dollar peg exposes East Asian economies to fluctuations in the dollar–yen exchange rate has stimulated research on currency basket regimes as alternatives for these economies. However, existing studies have mostly ignored an important characteristic of East Asia, i.e., most of its international trade is invoiced in the U.S. dollars. This paper investigates how the preponderance of dollar invoicing affects optimal currency basket regimes for East Asian economies. I develop a three-country center-periphery sticky-price dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for the analysis. The model is solved numerically by taking second-order approximations to the policy functions with the expected lifetime utility of households chosen as the welfare criterion. Contrary to the conjecture of existing literature, I show that predominance of dollar invoicing implies that the dollar should receive a smaller weight than suggested by bilateral trade shares between emerging markets in East Asia and the United States. The results hinge on the interaction of different degrees of pass-through implied by the choice of invoice currency and endogenous responses of monetary policies in the center countries.     

Monetary basis of trade imbalance

The purpose of this paper is to lay simple yet elegant, formal microeconomic foundations for the theory that monetary policy is a principal determinant of international trade imbalance. Foreign exchange is a different form of real liquidity, not a perfect substitute for domestic currency. As a result, foreign money is traded as a commodity in exchange for consumption goods. If the monetary policies of two countries differ, a permanently unbalanced flow of goods may arise. Specifically, this paper argues that a high-inflation regime is likely to induce a perpetual trade deficit.     

Net foreign asset positions and appreciation expectations on the Swiss franc and the Japanese Yen

The paper shows that currencies of countries with persistent current account surpluses and high foreign-currency denominated assets, such as the Swiss franc and the Japanese yen, are under persistent appreciation pressure, particularly when the centres of the world monetary system follow expansionary monetary policies. This limits the choice of exchange rate regime. Given flexible exchange rates, a negative risk premium on the domestic interest rate can emerge. Empirical estimations provide mixed evidence for a negative impact of net foreign asset positions and exchange rate uncertainty on interest rates of international creditor countries at the periphery of the world monetary system.     

Testing the Unstable Middle and Two Corners Hypotheses About Exchange Rate Regimes

The recent rash of international currency crises has generated considerable interest in the role that exchange rate regimes have played in contributing to these crises. Many economists have argued that efforts to operate adjustably pegged exchange rate regimes have been a major contributor to “the unstable middle” hypothesis and some have argued that this unstable middle is so broad that only the two corners of hard fixes or floating rates will be stable in a world of high capital mobility—the two corners or bipolar hypothesis. Two recent empirical studies by researchers at the International Monetary Fund reach opposing conclusions on these issues. We examine the issue further and show that conclusions can be quite sensitive to how exchange rate regimes are grouped into categories and the measures of currency crises that are used. In general we find that the dead center of the adjustable peg is by far the most crisis prone broad type of exchange rate regimes, but that countries need not go all the way to freely floating rates or hard fixes to substantially reduce the risks of currency crises.

Fundamentals and Technical Trading: Behavior of Exchange Rates in the CEECs

We incorporate technical trading into the monetary approach to exchange rates, and estimate the model for four Central and Eastern European countries that introduced the policy of free floating in the late 1990s; the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. We find that past exchange rates contribute significantly to the determination of the spot exchange rate. We also find a feedback behavior driving the exchange rate to its fundamental value although the mean reversion parameter is small. Overall, this means that these currency markets have developed a complex structure of different trader types, which already is documented for developed countries.     

Exchange-Rate Policies in Emerging Countries: Eleven Empirical Regularities From Latin America and East Asia

In this paper I discuss some of the most important lessons on exchange-rate policies in emerging markets during the last 35 years. The analysis is undertaken from the perspective of both the Latin American and East Asian nations. Some of the topics addressed include: the relationship between exchange-rate regimes and growth, the costs of currency crises, the merits of “dollarization,” the relationship between exchange rates and macroeconomic stability, monetary independence under alternative exchange-rate arrangements, and the effects of the recent global “currency wars” on exchange rates in commodity exporters.     

Is Asian Currency Unit Attractive to East Asian Economies？

Pegging the RMB exchange rate to the Asian currency unit (ACU) has not, at least in the short term, been proved a better solution than pegging to the US dollar or pegging to a G‐3 (US$, Japanese yen and euro) currency basket. Although the Asian currency unit can help Asian economies to keep the relative price of regional currencies stable, the cost of joining a formal regional monetary cooperation is the relinquishment of the autonomy of their domestic policies. Asian monetary cooperation needs to provide more potential benefits if it is to attract Asian economies. We argue that Asian monetary cooperation should be designed to solve the problem of regional trade imbalance, and regional exchange rate policy coordination should be adopted as the first step towards exchange rate cooperation. (Edited by Zhinan Zhang)