This volume presents seven comparative studies of currency crises, which happened in the decade of 1990s in Latin America, South East Asia and in transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former USSR. All the studies were prepared under the research project no. OI44/H02/99/17 on "Analysis of Currency Crises in Countries of Asia, Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe: Lessons for Poland and Other Transition Countries", carried out by CASE and financed by the Committee for Scientific Research (KBN) in the years 1999-2001. They will be subjects of public presentation and discussion during the seminar in Warsaw organized by CASE on June 28, 2001, under the same research project. This is a continuation of two other issues of CASE Reports containing eleven countries' monographs related to currency crises episodes in these three regions and a couple of other comparative studies published in the CASE Studies and Analyzes series. Three first studies in this volume deal with broad issue of current account, exchange rate and international reserves of a central bank. Marcin Sasin discusses the importance of the real exchange rate overvaluation and the current account deficit, which are usually considered as the main causes of currency crises. While generally confirming the importance of the first factor, author shows that question of sustainability of current account deficit has a very individual country characteristic. The next analysis of Malgorzata Jakubiak concerns the choice of exchange rate regimes from the point of view of both avoiding and efficient managing currency crises. Author compares advantages and disadvantages of the fixed versus floating exchange rate regimes from the point of view of credibility of monetary policies, preventing currency crisis and coping with its consequences. She demonstrates, basing on an empirical analysis, that the most costly are changes of exchange rate regimes (usually abandoning the peg) under the pressure of speculative attack. Mateusz Szczurek provides the additional insight to this discussion estimating the size of optimal international liquidity taking into consideration potential costs of the crisis, on the one hand, and costs of maintaining the international reserves, on the other. The next study concerns interrelations between banking and currency crises basing on extensive review of an economic literature. Marcin Sasin analyzes the institutional and structural sources of instability of the banking sector in emerging markets. One of them is the direct and indirect vulnerability of banks in relation to sudden interest rate and exchange rate changes. On the other hand, collapse of the some big banks must lead to credibility crisis of a domestic currency. Lukasz Rawdanowicz addresses another hot issue in the economic debates of the last decade, i.e. contagion effect of a crisis in one country on the macroeconomic stability of its close and more distant neighbors. He analyzes the impact of the Russian 1998 crisis on the situation of CIS countries taking into consideration both trade and financial channels. Monika Blaszkiewicz and Wojciech Paczynski try to assess the economic and social consequences of currency crises in the last decade. The main question discussed by them is to what extent crisis plays a role of self-correcting mechanism of previously unsustainable policies. Finally, Rafal Antczak, Malgorzata Markiewicz and Artur Radziwill analyze the role of the IMF in preventing the currency crises in five selected CIS countries - Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, identifying the main sources of Fund's failures.
