Over the past 10 years, central banks and governments throughout the developing world have accumulated foreign exchange reserves and other official assets at an unprecedented rate. This paper shows that this official asset accumulation has driven a substantial portion of the recent large global...

Official purchases of foreign assets--a broad definition of currency intervention--are strongly correlated with current account (trade) imbalances. Causality runs in both directions, but statistical analysis using instrumental variables reveals that the effect of official asset purchases on...

This paper presents a simple model of how a small open economy can undervalue its real exchange rate using its capital account policies. The paper presents several properties of such policies, and proposes a rule of thumb to assess their welfare cost. The model is applied to an analysis of...

Two aspects of global imbalances--undervalued exchange rates and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs--require a multilateral response. For reasons of inadequate leverage and eroding legitimacy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has not been effective in dealing with undervalued exchange rates. We...

This paper addresses two central questions for Asia and the world: (1) What is the purpose of Asian regional policy coordination going forward? (2) Will Asian regional policy coordination substitute or complement global policy coordination? The paper examines the potential coverage and content...

This paper analyzes how the global financial crisis has impacted emerging Asia and identifies key characteristics that have made these economies more or less vulnerable to a transmission of crises from the advanced economies. After reviewing how economic outcomes in emerging Asia have evolved...

This paper traces the evolution of the Federal Reserve and its engagement with the global economy over the last three decades of the 20th century: 1970 to 2000. The paper examines the Federal Reserve’s role in international economic and financial policy and analysis covering four areas: the...

Halving the US current account deficit as a share of GDP is likely to impose a burden of $2,350 per capita on the United States, which explains why US policymakers want to postpone adjustment. The rest of the world relies on the economic stimulus of a widening US external deficit, which explains...

This working paper assesses the progress made in improving China’s exchange rate policies over the past five years (that is, since 2002). I first discuss four indicators of progress on China’s external imbalance and its exchange rate policies—namely, the change in (and level of) China’s...

Scholarship on European integration has extensively debated the external character of the monetary union. The institutions of exchange rate policymaking bear substantially on the euro area’s role in international monetary conflict and cooperation. This working paper examines the institutional...