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Experience of and Lessons from Exchange Rate Regimes in Emerging Economies
Jeffrey A. Frankel Harpel Professor, Harvard University
Revised, Feb. 26 and September 8, 2003.
This paper was written for Monetary and Financial Cooperation in East Asia forthcoming, Macmillan Press, 2003, in consultation with the Regional Economic Monitoring Unit of the Asian Development Bank, and Takatoshi Ito and Yung Chul Park, coordinators of the ADB core study on exchange rate arrangements. The author would like to thank Sergio Schmukler for preparing Table 3.
Experience of and Lessons from Exchange Rate Regimes in Emerging Economies Jeffrey A. Frankel NBER Working Paper August 2003 JEL No. F
ABSTRACT
The paper reviews recent trends in thinking on exchange rate regimes. It begins by
classifying countries into regimes, noting the distinction between de facto and de jure
regimes, but also noting the low correlation among proposed ways of classifying the
latter. The advantages of fixed exchange rates versus floating are reviewed, including
the recent evidence on the trade-promoting effects of currency unions. Frameworks for
tallying up the pros and cons include the traditional Optimum Currency Area criteria, as
well as some new criteria from the experiences of the 1990s. The Corners Hypothesis
may now be “peaking” as rapidly as it rose, in light of its lack of foundations. Empirical
evidence regarding the economic performance of different regimes depends entirely on
the classification scheme. A listing of possible nominal anchors alongside exchange
rates observes that each candidate has its own vulnerability, leading to the author’s
proposal to Peg the Export Price (PEP). The concluding section offers some implications
for East Asia.
Jeffrey A. Frankel Kennedy School of Government Harvard University 79 JFK Street Cambridge MA 02138- and NBER jeffrey_frankel@harvard.edu
yen in its basket, 1 and was in 1997 still on a de jure basket peg. All the others had been on intermediate regimes both de facto and de jure. Mexico, Indonesia, Russia, Brazil, and Turkey had all been keeping their exchange rates within target zones (bands), often combined with a preannounced rate of crawl. The Market Average Rate system of the Republic of Korea (Korea) had been classified by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as managed floating (and the US Treasury semiannual reports to Congress had in the early 1990s pronounced that the Korean Government had stopped “manipulating” the value of the won, by which it meant that Korea had supposedly begun to let the private market determine the exchange rate) 2. These arrangements are neither fixed nor floating, but are properly denoted “intermediate regimes.”
Accordingly, a second school of thought holds that it is precisely the looseness of the commitment that gets the intermediate regimes into trouble, and that the prescribed policy is a firm institutional commitment such as a currency board or the outright abolition of the national currency, in order to buy absolute credibility for the central bank. Examples include the currency boards of Hong Kong, China; Argentina (until 2001); and some other small economies, particularly in Eastern Europe (Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria); the dollarizers, old (Panama) as well as new (Ecuador and El Salvador); and the 12 members of the European Monetary Union (EMU). Proponents urge the virtues of currency boards or dollarization on emerging market countries everywhere.
The dominant conventional wisdom to emerge in the late 1990s was a third school of thought: the corners hypothesis. This viewpoint is also variously called bipolarity, hollowing out, the missing middle, and the hypothesis of the vanishing intermediate regime. It neither insists that countries generally should float nor that countries generally should institutionally fix. Rather, it says that countries generally should be (or are) moving to one extreme or the other, that the lesson of the recent crises is just the nonviability of intermediate regimes such as those followed in the crisis countries of the 1990s. Part IV of this paper discusses the corners hypothesis in more detail. It argues that the hypothesis may start to drop out of favor in the aftermath of the experiences of Argentina in 2001 and Brazil in 2002, as rapidly as it gained favor in the aftermath of the 1997-1998 East Asia crisis.
Although newspaper opinion/editorial pieces often pretend that there is only one valid side to an argument, economists are accustomed to thinking of everything as a trade-off between competing advantages. It is important not to rush to a judgment over the optimal exchange rate regime before listing pros and cons and then trying to add them up. The author’s position is that all three categories of exchange rate regime—floating, firm fixing, and intermediate regimes—are appropriate for some countries, and that the choice of appropriate regime cannot be made independently of knowledge of the
(^1) Frankel (1995a, b) and Frankel and Wei (1994, 1997) offered statistical evidence against what was then the common view regarding links to the yen. More recent estimates of the implicit weights in the currency baskets of East Asian countries are offered by Benassy-Quere (1999) and Ohno (1999).
(^2) Frankel (1993a, b).
circumstances facing the country in question. No single regime is right for all countries, and even for a given country, it may be that no single regime is right at all times. 3
After part I of this paper enumerates alternative exchange rate regimes, part II briefly reviews the advantages of fixed exchange rates, followed by the advantages of floating exchange rates. Part III discusses frameworks for tallying up the advantages on one side versus the other so that individual countries can make a decision; the traditional framework is the theory of optimum currency areas, but new lessons came out of the experience of the 1990s. Part IV discusses the rise (and possible fall) of the corners hypothesis. Part V reviews some empirical evidence on the performance of alternative regimes. Part VI surveys other possible nominal anchors, recognizing that for monetary authorities not to target the exchange rate opens the question of whether they should instead target something else, like the consumer price index (CPI), money supply, nominal gross domestic product (GDP), price of gold, or (a newly proposed contender for countries with specialized trade) the price of the export good. Part VII draws some implications for East Asia and the possibility of a common peg.
Classifying Countries into Regimes
There are of course many more regimes than two, an entire continuum that can be arrayed from most flexible to most rigidly fixed. I distinguish nine, grouped into the three broad categories of floating, intermediate, and firmly fixed. The list follows.
A. Floating corner
- Free floating
- Managed floating
B. Intermediate regimes
- Band 3a. Bergsten-Williamson target zone (fundamental equilibrium exchange rate) 3b. Krugman-ERM target zone (fixed nominal central parity)
- Crawling peg 4a. Indexed 4b. Preannounced crawl ( tablita, in Spanish)
- Basket peg
- Adjustable peg
C. Firm fix corner
- Currency board
- Dollarization (or euro-ization)
- Monetary union
There are many complications. Each of the intermediate regimes can itself range from so flexible as to belong truly in the floating category, to so rigid as to belong truly to the fixed corner. The relevant parameter in the case of the target zone is the width of the
(^3) This position, while hardly momentous or novel, is the point made in Frankel (1999).
Other methodologies have been suggested to classify countries in terms of the regimes that they actually follow, for example, by observing the variability in exchange rates and in reserve levels.^4 Typically, however, the classification does not feel persuasive or definitive. Worryingly, the attempts at de facto classification differ widely, not just from the de jure classification, but from each other as well. 5
Trends in popularity of regimes
We begin by considering the regimes currently followed by countries, as reported in the classification system of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) International Financial Statistics. This system does not follow countries’ self-description as slavishly as it once did, but it is useful to keep in mind that it is nevertheless an official or de jure classification.
Forty-eight countries have altogether given up an independent currency, by means of a firm institutional fix; 12 are the members of European Monetary Union (EMU), and 36 are developing countries or transition economies. Of those 36 countries,
- 8 are “dollarized” (Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, four South Pacific island countries, and San Marino where the legal tender is not the dollar but the Italian lira),
- 20 are in monetary unions (6 in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union and 14 in the CFA franc zone 6 , and
- 8 are in currency boards (now 7, with the departure of Argentina).
Of the 36 firm-fixers among developing countries, only Ecuador and El Salvador have adopted the dollar as legal tender recently. The others never had independent currencies in the first place. True, five sovereign countries in the 1990s adopted currency boards that they still have: Estonia (1992); Lithuania (1994); Bulgaria (1997); and Bosnia (1998); 7 plus Hong Kong (1983). If one includes the EMU 12, that adds up to about 20 countries that have chosen ultra-fixed exchange rate arrangements in the past decade. Does this constitute evidence that the heralded world trend toward a smaller number of currencies has begun? I will argue that it does not.
Ninety-eight members of the IMF are classified in an intermediate regime. Of these 98 countries, 29 follow conventional fixed peg arrangements, and 10 follow basket pegs. Both categories include some that claim as their regime managed floating while
(^4) Such as Calvo and Reinhart (2000) or Levy-Yeyati and Sturzenegger (2001). (^5) The latest, Reinhart and Rogoff (2002) proposes two new categories, “freely falling” and dual exchange rates. This classification makes a big difference for the set of countries that remains behind in the traditional categories. (We return to the question of de facto classification schemes, and the lack of correlation among them, toward the end of the paper.) 6 CFA = Communauté Financière de l’Afrique. Even the francophone countries of Africa finally devalued against the French franc in 1994, though they have retained their currency union among themselves. 7 Two smaller countries, Brunei Darussalam and Djibouti, have had currency boards since independence. In addition to these sovereign countries are some even smaller Caribbean island dependencies, Democratic Republic of Timor Leste, and Montenegro, which is said to be adopting a currency board too, or even declaring euros legal tender.
exhibiting de facto pegs, but both categories should also be called “adjustable pegs.” Sixteen follow bands or crawls (including five horizontal bands—four of them developing countries and one, Denmark, a remnant of the European Monetary System; four crawling pegs; and seven crawling bands). Forty-three are classified by the IMF as “managed floating with no preannounced path for the exchange rate,” a category that may sound like a float but which typically entails sufficient de facto targeting and intervention that it should probably be classified as an intermediate regime.
That leaves 40 countries that the IMF classifies as independently floating. Of these, 9 are industrialized countries and 31 are developing, middle-income, or transition countries. Thus, excluding industrialized countries, 36 can be counted as in the firm fix corner, 98 classified as intermediate regimes, and 31 assigned to the floating corner. (Since this compilation, two South American countries in early 2002 adopted some sort of float, that cannot yet be characterized: Argentina, which left its currency board, and Venezuela, which previously had a crawling band. For purposes of the three-way classification, I will treat Argentina as trading places with Guatemala, and Venezuela as remaining in the intermediate category.)
There is a clear trend toward increased flexibility over the last 30 years. Some claim that a trend from the intermediate regimes toward floating has its counterpart in another trend from the intermediate regimes toward firm fixing. This is the claim that the middle is hollowing out. It sometimes leads to the claim that there will be fewer currencies in the future than in the past. Fischer (2001), for example, reports that between 1991 and 1999, the fraction of IMF members that followed intermediate regimes dropped from 62% (98 countries) to 34% (63 countries). The fraction with hard pegs rose from 16% (25) to 24% (45), while the fraction floating rose from 23% (36) to 42% (77). There is nothing wrong with the Fischer statistics; expressing regime popularity in terms of percentages of IMF membership is probably the relevant metric from the viewpoint of the management of the organization. But it neglects that the membership of the IMF, or of just about any other list of the world’s sovereign nations, has been expanding over time. During the same two decades, when roughly two dozen countries gave up monetary independence by adopting currency boards, dollarization, or EMU, roughly the same number of new countries has been created, mainly by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Each of these previously had shared its currency with neighbors. For this reason, out of the list of regions that are today’s sovereign countries, roughly the same number share the currency of another today as they did 20 years ago.
Thus, only two developing countries that had their own sovereign currencies 10 or 20 years ago have given them up today (Ecuador and El Salvador), and only one more has adopted a currency board (Bulgaria). So much for the famous trend toward the firm fix corner! By this criterion, contrary to widespread impression, the facts do not support the claim that developing countries are rapidly moving toward the corners and vacating the middle.
One might instead assert a sort of Markov stasis, in which independent currencies are always being created, disappearing, and switching among regimes, but the overall pool remains roughly steady. Masson (2001) statistically rejects the hypothesis that "hard
markets. Third, empirically, it was hard to discern an adverse statistical effect from increased exchange rate volatility on trade. But each of these arguments can be rebutted. First, most exchange rate volatility in fact appears to be unrelated to macroeconomic fundamentals. Second, many developing country currencies have no forward markets; and even in those that do, there are costs to hedging (transactions costs plus the exchange risk premium). Third, more recent econometric studies, based on large cross sections that include many small and developing countries, have found stronger evidence of an effect of exchange rate variability on trade (especially on a bilateral basis, where far more data are available) 8 than did earlier studies. Table 1 reports estimates of the stimulus to trade and growth that individual developing countries would eventually experience if they were to adopt the dollar or the euro as their currencies.
[Table 1 goes about here]
A third advantage of fixed exchange rates is that they prevent competitive depreciation or competitive appreciation. Competitive depreciation can be viewed as an inferior Nash noncooperative equilibrium, where each country tries in vain to win a trade advantage over its neighbors. In such a model, fixing exchange rates can be an efficient institution for achieving the cooperative solution. The architects of the Bretton Woods system thought about the problem in terms of the “beggar thy neighbor” policies of the 1930s. The example can be updated by one possible interpretation of the notorious contagion experienced in the crises of the 1990s. Each time one country in East Asia or Latin America devalued, its neighbors were instantly put at a competitive disadvantage, serving to transfer the balance of payments pressure to them (e.g., from Mexico to Argentina in 1995, from Thailand to the rest of East Asia in 1997, and from Brazil to the rest of South America in 1999). Many of them felt that the standard prescription to devalue did not work, in an environment where their neighbors and competitors were devaluing at the same time. If so, a cooperative agreement not to devalue might seem called for.
The final argument for fixed exchange rates is to preclude speculative bubbles of the sort that pushed up the dollar in 1985 or the yen in 1995. As we already noted, some exchange rate fluctuations appear utterly unrelated to economic fundamentals. This observation then allows at least the possibility that, if the exchange rate fluctuations were eliminated, there might in fact not be an outburst of fundamental uncertainty somewhere else. Rather, the “bubble term in the differential equation” might simply disappear.
Advantages of floating exchange rates
As there are four advantages to fixed exchange rates, there are also four advantages to flexible exchange rates.
The leading advantage of exchange rate flexibility is that it allows the country to pursue an independent monetary policy. The argument in favor of monetary independence, instead of constraining monetary policy by the fixed exchange rate, is the
(^8) Frankel and Wei (1994), Rose (2000), Frankel and Rose (2002), and Parsley and Wei (2001).
classic argument for discretion, instead of rules. When the economy is hit by a disturbance, such as a fall in demand for the goods it produces, the government would like to be able to respond so that the country does not go into recession. Under fixed exchange rates, monetary policy is always diverted, at least to some extent, to dealing with the balance of payments. This single instrument can not be used to achieve both internal balance and external balance. Under the combination of fixed exchange rates and complete integration of financial markets , which for example characterizes EMU, the situation is more extreme: monetary policy becomes altogether powerless to affect internal balance. Under these conditions, the domestic interest rate is tied to the foreign interest rate. An expansion in the money supply has no effect: the new money flows out of the country via a balance-of-payments deficit, just as quickly as it is created. In the face of an adverse disturbance, the country must simply live with the effects. After a fall in demand, the recession may last until wages and prices are bid down, or until some other automatic mechanism of adjustment takes hold, which may be a long time. By freeing up the currency to float, on the other hand, the country can respond to a recession by means of monetary expansion and depreciation of the currency. This stimulates the demand for domestic products and returns the economy to desired levels of employment and output more rapidly than would be the case under the automatic mechanisms of adjustment on which a fixed-rate country must rely.
The unfortunate reality is that few developing countries have been able to make effective use of discretionary monetary policy. But even if one gives up on deliberate changes in monetary policy, there is a second advantage of floating: that it allows automatic adjustment to trade shocks. The currency responds to adverse developments in the country’s export markets or other shifts in the terms of trade by depreciating, thus achieving the necessary real depreciation even in the presence of sticky prices or wages.
The third advantage of an independent currency is that the government retains two important advantages of an independent central bank: seigniorage and lender-of-last- resort ability. The central bank’s ability to act as a lender of last resort for the banking system depends to a degree on the knowledge that it can create as much money as necessary to bail out banks in difficulty. For a while it was claimed that a country that moved to the firm-fix corner and allowed foreign banks to operate inside its borders, like Argentina, would not need a lender of last resort because the foreign parents of local banking subsidiaries would bail them out in time of difficulty. Unfortunately, Argentina’s experience in 2001 has now disproved this claim.
Recall that the fourth argument for stabilizing the exchange rate arose from an increasingly evident disadvantage of free floating: occasional speculative bubbles (possibly rational, possibly not) that eventually burst. However, there is a corresponding fourth argument for flexibility that arises from an increasingly evident disadvantage of pegging: a tendency toward borrowers’ effectively unhedged exposure in foreign currency (possibly rational, possibly not 9 ), ending badly in speculative attacks and multiple equilibrium. Overvaluation, excessive volatility, and crashes are possible in either regime.
(^9) Some who have recently argued for floating on these grounds imply that it would be beneficial to introduce gratuitous volatility into the exchange rate to discourage unhedged borrowing in foreign currency.
Labor mobility. One OCA criterion offered in the original Mundell (1961) article was labor mobility, here defined as the ease of labor movement between the country in question and its neighbors. If the economy is highly integrated with its neighbors by this criterion, then workers may be able to respond to a local recession by moving across the border to get jobs, so there is less need for a local monetary expansion or devaluation.
Fiscal cushions. The existence of a federal fiscal system to transfer funds to regions that suffer adverse shocks offers another way to help mitigate macroeconomic fluctuations in the absence of an independent currency.
Symmetry. To the extent that shocks to the two economies are correlated, monetary independence is not needed in any case: the two can share a monetary expansion in tandem.
Political willingness to accept neighbors’ policies To the extent that domestic residents have economic priorities—especially on fighting inflation versus unemployment—that are similar to those of their neighbors, there will be less need for a differentiated response to common shocks.
Criteria of the 1990s
The introduction of currency board-like arrangements in Hong Kong, China (1983); Argentina (1991); Estonia (1992); Lithuania (1994); Bulgaria (1997); Bosnia (1998); and two smaller countries constituted a resurgence in their use worldwide. A currency board can help to create a credible policy environment by removing from the monetary authorities the option of printing money to finance government deficits. Argentina, for example, at first benefited from such credibility. Argentina was prompted to adopt a currency board (which it called the convertibility plan) because of a dramatic hyperinflation in the 1980s and the absence of a credible monetary authority. After 1991, Argentina became a model of price stability and achieved laudable growth rates, aside from setbacks such as the Mexican peso “tequila”-induced recession in 1995, from which Argentina soon rebounded strongly. By most accounts, the currency board was working for Argentina.
And yet Argentina never did fit well the traditional OCA criteria. It is not particularly small or open, or subject to high labor mobility or close correlation with the US economy. A new set of criteria to supplement or even replace the OCA framework were proposed, relevant particularly to the decision to adopt an institutional commitment to a fixed rate. Whereas the older framework had to do with trade and cyclical stability, the new characteristics had to do with international financial markets and credibility. The additional criteria 12 follow:
- a strong (even desperate) need to import monetary stability, due to either a history of hyperinflation, an absence of credible public institutions, unusually large
(^12) Similar lists are also offered by Williamson (1996) and Larrain and Velasco (2001).
exposure to nervous international investors, or instability arising from a dangerous political environment;
- a desire for further close integration with a particular neighbor or trading partner (which has the added advantage of enhancing the political credibility of the commitment);
- an economy in which the foreign currency is already widely used;^13
- access to an adequate level of reserves;
- rule of law; and
- a strong, well-supervised, and regulated financial system.
Currency board supporters pushed for its wider use in the crises of the 1990s—in particular, for Indonesia, Russia, and Ukraine. Proclaiming a currency board does not automatically guarantee the credibility of the fixed rate peg. Little credibility is gained from putting an exchange rate peg into the law, in a country where laws are not heeded or are changed at will. Beyond the rule of law, a currency board is unlikely to be successful without the solid fundamentals of adequate reserves, fiscal discipline, and a strong and well-supervised financial system.
The Rise and fall of the Corners Hypothesis
The debate over exchange rate regimes is an old one. And yet, a genuinely new element was thrown into the mix in the late 1990s. This is the proposition that countries are—or should be—moving to the corner solutions. They are said to be opting either, on the one hand, for full flexibility, or, on the other hand, for rigid institutional commitments to fixed exchange rates, in the form of currency boards or full monetary union with the dollar or euro. It is said that the intermediate exchange rate regimes are no longer feasible. The target zones, crawls, basket pegs, and pegs-adjustable-under-an-implicit- escape-clause are going the way of the dinosaurs. A corollary of this theory is that the number of independent currencies in the world is declining, perhaps with a rising fraction of the world accounted for by a few large regional blocs built around the dollar, the euro, and perhaps the yen or some other currency in Asia.
Surely a proposition that has become such conventional wisdom as the vanishing intermediate regime has a distinguished intellectual pedigree? Not really.
(^13) In a country that is already partially dollarized, devaluation is of little use. If many wages and prices are already tied to the dollar, they will simply rise by the same amount as the exchange rate. If liabilities are already denominated in dollars—and, in the case of international liabilities, foreign creditors in emerging markets generally insist on this—then devaluation may bankrupt domestic borrowers. Such initial conditions are discussed as criteria for dollarization by Calvo (1999) and Hausmann et al. (1999).
Other high-profile examples include Eichengreen (1999, p.104-105), Minton-Beddoes (1999), and Council on Foreign Relations (1999, p.87). The G-7 (Group of Seven) Finance Ministers agreed that the IMF should not in the future bail out countries that get into trouble by following an intermediate regime, though it qualified the scope of the generalization a bit, for example, by allowing a possible exception for “systemically” important countries. It is not only the international financial establishment that has decided intermediate regimes are nonviable. The Meltzer report, commissioned by the US Congress to recommend fundamental reform of international financial institutions, adopted the proposition as well: “The Commission recommends that …the IMF should use its policy consultations to recommend either firmly fixed rates (currency board, dollarization) or fluctuating rates” (Meltzer 2000, p.8).
The Economist (1999, p.15-16) was thus probably right when it wrote that “Most academics now believe that only radical solutions will work: either currencies must float freely, or they must be tightly tied (through a currency board or, even better, currency unions).” But the proposition remains yet to be demonstrated.
It is true that for the middle-income emerging market countries, all of which have been exposed to substantial financial volatility in recent years, the casualties among intermediate regimes have been high. Mexico, Thailand, Korea, Indonesia, Russia, Brazil, and Turkey were each forced by speculative attack to abandon a sort of basket or band. The other countries that abandoned band arrangements in the late 1990s also included the Czech Republic (27 May 1997), Ecuador (4 March 1999), Chile ( September 1999), and Colombia (26 September 1999).^15 While most of these policy changes took place under great pressure, Chile was not facing tremendous speculative pressure when it made its switch. Indonesia abandoned the bands before the full crisis hit. This move won praise at the time. Even though the country was soon thereafter hit with the worst of the Asian crises, commentators today tend to include Indonesia in the list of data points that is supposed to demonstrate the superiority of the floating option over the band option. At the same time, Hong Kong, China, in Asia and Argentina in Latin America, the two economies with currency boards, were the ones that got through the 1990s successfully, judged by the (very particular) criterion of avoiding being forced into increased exchange rate flexibility. As a statement of observed trends, at least, the set of emerging market countries in the late 1990s did seem to bear out the claimed movement toward the corners. It seems intuitively right that these countries, facing finicky international investors and rapidly disappearing foreign exchange reserves, had little alternative but to abandon their pegs and baskets and bands and crawls and move to a float, unless they were prepared to go to the opposite corner. But this proposition is in need of a rationale.
Should countries be moving toward the corners? We saw in part II that a majority of developing countries still follow intermediate regimes. Do they have good reasons for their choices? Close to the center of the economists’ creed is that interior solutions are
(^15) Goldman Sachs.
more likely to be optimal—for the interesting questions—compared with corner solutions.
Lack of theoretical foundations for the corners hypothesis
What is the analytical rationale for the hypothesis of the disappearing intermediate regime (or the “missing middle”)? Surprisingly, none currently exists.
At first glance, it appears to be a corollary to the principle of the Impossible Trinity. 16 That principle says that a country must give up one of three goals: exchange rate stability, monetary independence, and financial market integration. It cannot have all three simultaneously. If one adds the observation that financial markets are steadily becoming more and more integrated internationally, that forces the choice down to giving up on exchange rate stability or giving up on monetary independence.
This is not the same thing, however, as saying one cannot give up both complete stability and complete independence, that one cannot have half-stability and half- independence in monetary policy. Economists tend to believe in interior solutions for most problems. In the closed-economy context, Rogoff (1985) derived the optimal intermediate degree of commitment to a nominal target for monetary policy, balancing the advantages of precommitment against the advantages of discretionary response to shocks.
There is nothing in existing theory, for example, that prevents a country from pursuing an exchange rate target zone of moderate width. The elegant line of target-zone theory begun by Krugman (1991), in which speculation helped stabilize the currency, always assumed perfect capital mobility. Similarly, there is nothing that prevents the government from pursuing a managed float in which half of every fluctuation in demand for its currency is accommodated by intervention and half is allowed to be reflected in the exchange rate. (To model this, one need only introduce a “leaning against the wind” central bank reaction function into a standard monetary model of exchange rate determination.) And there is nothing that prevents a country from pursuing a peg with an escape clause contingent on exogenous shocks or, more practically, a peg that is abandoned whenever there is a shock large enough to use up half its reserves. Another justification that has been offered for the corners hypothesis is that when a government establishes any sort of exchange rate target, as did the East Asian countries, its banks and firms foolishly underestimate the possibility of a future break in the currency value. 17 As a result, they incur large unhedged dollar liabilities abroad. When a devaluation occurs, their domestic-currency revenues are inadequate for servicing their debts, and so they go bankrupt, with devastating consequences for the economy.
(^16) Summers (1999b, p. 326) is explicit: “…the core principle of monetary economics is a trilemma: that capital mobility, an independent monetary policy, and the maintenance of a fixed exchange rate objective are mutually incompatible. I suspect this means that as capital market integration increases, countries will be forced increasingly to more pure floating or more purely fixed exchange rate regimes.”
(^17) The version of this argument in Eichengreen (1999, p.104) overstates the extent to which the East Asians had “a stated commitment to the peg,” as most commentators have done as well. In fact, as already noted, few of the East Asian countries had explicit dollar pegs.
would be a repeat of the earlier mistakes. Instead, when the devaluation finally came in January 1999, Brazil’s trade balance improved sharply, the lack of confidence subsided, and output and employment subsequently performed far better than in neighboring Argentina. Thus, it is more difficult to generalize from recent experience than widely believed. Furthermore, if we are to use government reluctance to exit a target arrangement as the basis of a model of the nonviability of intermediate regimes, it seems that we would again require some sort of irrationality (or political constraints^20 ) on the part of policy makers.
Thus, each of the three arguments offered— the impossible trinity, the dangers of unhedged dollar liabilities, and the political difficulty of exiting—contains some important truth. But none seems able to stand as a theoretical rationale for the superiority of the corners solutions over the intermediate regimes. Perhaps the corners hypothesis, then, is just a misplaced manifestation of the temptation to believe that the grass is always greener somewhere else, in this case, in the corners of the pasture?
Frankel et al. (2000) offer another possible reason to favor the firm fix corner: verifiability. Central banks announce intermediate targets such as exchange rates so that the public can judge from observed data whether they are following the policy announced. The general point of that paper is that simple regimes are more verifiable by market participants than complicated ones. Of the various intermediate regimes (managed float, peg with escape clause, etc.), that paper focuses on basket pegs with bands. Statistically, it takes a surprisingly long span of data to distinguish such a regime from a floating exchange rate. We apply the econometrics, first, to the example of Chile and, second, by performing Monte Carlo simulations. The amount of data required to verify the declared regime may exceed the length of time during which the regime is maintained. The amount of information necessary increases with the complexity of the regime, including the width of the band and the number of currencies in the basket.
Although Frankel et al. (2000) may have convinced a few people that BBC regimes are not as verifiable as previously thought, it has not been accepted as a theoretical rationale for the corners hypothesis. The model to support the proposition is yet to be designed.
In the author’s view, the Argentine crisis of 2001 dealt a severe blow to the conventional view that a country that was willing to make a firm and sincere institutional commitment to a rigidly fixed exchange rate, as under a currency board, could thereby import credibility, and achieve convergence in price levels and interest rates. It has thereby also dealt a severe blow to the corners hypothesis. The situation is far worse than the remarkable fact that a supposedly ironclad fix came undone in a short period of time. Argentina’s 1999–2002 recession has been so severe as to fully reverse the very good income gains during the heyday of the currency board, 1991–1998. If the average growth rates reported in the next section were updated, it seems likely that the entire currency board category would be pulled down substantially.
(^20) Governments may have an incentive to postpone devaluations until after elections. See Stein and Streb (1998, 1999).
There will be those who will say that the events of 2001 merely prove that Argentina did not go far enough, that it should have gone all the way to full dollarization. But the example of Ecuador is instructive. Three years after its move to full dollarization, inflation still exceeds 20%. True, Ecuador devalued sharply before it decided to dollarize, so that much of the increase in the price level could be interpreted as catching up to purchasing power parity (PPP). But there are two disturbing points: (i) the process has taken 3 years, and inflation is still there; and (ii) apparently the currency is now overvalued in real terms. Many economists have lost their ability to be surprised by the realities of slow price adjustment, inertial inflation, and failures of PPP. Nevertheless, that such imperfections of the goods market can remain so severe in a dollarized economy means that the transforming benefits of dollarization (and the realism of a forward-looking expectations theory) have been greatly oversold. Furthermore, Ecuador’s interest rates have not converged to US interest rates any better than did Argentina’s interest rates in the 1990s.
Perhaps Ecuador is too small a country to serve as the basis of generalization. But it is now probably the largest of the developing countries to be in the institutionally fixed corner. To say that very small open economies must decide whether or not to give up their currencies is true. But the firm-fix zealots certainly had in mind something of general applicability, as did even the mainstream proponents of the corners hypothesis. That no moderate-size emerging market country has successfully adopted a currency board or dollarization must cast doubts on the strength of the alleged trend.
Meanwhile many developing countries, especially in East Asia, have quietly been moving back in the direction of de facto intermediate regimes. Malaysia has an exchange rate target (aided, at least initially in 1998, by capital controls). Even the star floaters, Mexico and Brazil, have started intervening in the foreign exchange market again. The latter country was under severe financial pressure at the time of writing (August 2002); the IMF responded with a new program that deliberately increased the central bank’s ability to intervene in the foreign exchange market.
Empirical evidence on the performance of regimes
Because there are so many pros and cons to exchange rate regimes, there have been few attempts at an overall empirical evaluation of their performance. The estimates reported in Table 1 will not serve, for example, because they are designed to capture only one of many effects on growth (the stimulus that common currencies give to trade). They leave out the potential advantages of countercyclical stabilization under flexible exchange rates, or long-term price stability under fixed exchange rates. Here we review three recent attempts to evaluate overall performance that have received a lot of attention.
Ghosh et al. (2000) compared the economic performance of currency boards, other pegs, and floating exchange rates, with countries placed into regimes by the IMF’s de jure classification system. The upper panel of Table 2 summarizes their finding with respect to the growth rate. The currency boards grew the most rapidly, on average, by a considerable margin. The average growth rates of the floaters and the regular pegs are fairly close together; which is higher depending on whether one looks at growth in total income or in
