This paper reviews developments and issues in the exchange arrangements and currency convertibility of IMF members. Against the backdrop of continuing financial globalization and a series of emerging market crises since 1997, there have been important changes in the evolution of exchange rate...

This paper seeks to advance the discussion of monetary policy strategies in several ways. One involves a comparison of targets for nominal GNP and the price level, with emphasis on specificational robustness and implications for output variability. A second pertains to various “indicator”...

This paper examines the dynamics of the foreign exchange market. The first half addresses a number of key questions regarding the forecasts of future exchange rates made by market participants, by means of updated estimates using survey data. Here we follow most of the theoretical and empirical...

Contrary to the arguments of several scholars, we have failed to find either a conclusive theoretical case or clear empirical evidence of an effect, harmful or otherwise, of exchange rate variability (as measured by either short-term volatility or long-run misalignment) on overall levels of...

This paper describes and analyzes forward market systems with varying degrees of sophistication, and it assesses them from the viewpoint of a smaller industrial or developing country asking itself how it could institute such a system, or how it could further develop an existing system in a way...

This collection of papers, edited by Victor Argy and Paul De Grauwe, examines issues surrounding the choice of exchange rate regime in smaller industrial countries. It contains a comprehensive summary by Jacques J. Polak

This paper outlines legal developments related to floating currencies, gold, and special drawing rights (SDRs) in the IMF. The Articles of the Fund require each member to establish a par value for its currency in terms of gold as a common denominator. Alternatively, the par value may be...

The literature on two-tier foreign exchange markets has concentrated on relating various shocks to the spread between the exchange rates relevant to the two tiers of the exchange market. In some earlier work we found that none of the typical predictions of theory held up empirically as BLEU...

Several Asian emerging market economies have recently adopted measures to limit the offshore trading of their currencies. This paper provides a general overview of such measures and evaluates the experiences of selected countries that resorted to such measures. It concludes that the measures...

In this paper we develop and test a model of a utility maximizing representative agent operating in the Belgium-Luxembourg two-tier foreign exchange market. Our tests examine and fail to reject a risk neutral representative agent utility function. When we combine a risk neutral utility function...