In emerging-market economies, real exchange rate adjustment is critical for maintaining a sustainable current account position and thereby for helping to reduce macroeconomic and financial instability. The authors examine empirically two related hypotheses: (i) that real exchange rate...

Recent research has found that current account balances under flexible regimes seem to be no less persistent than under fixed regimes. This result appears to undermine Milton Friedman's well known — and commonly accepted — claim that flexible exchange rates facilitate the adjustment of...

Many sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries liberalized their economies in the 1980s and early 1990s. This paper reviews the foreign exchange regime reforms in selected SSA, and their associated macroeconomic policies and economic performance during and after these reforms were undertaken. Before...

This is one of the contributions which is part of BIS Paper 68 and which was presented at the BIS-sponsored sessions at the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) meetings in 2010-11, focusing on the drivers and effects of capital flows and the challenges they pose for the...

This is one of the contributions which is part of BIS Paper 68 and which was presented at the BIS-sponsored sessions at the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) meetings in 2010-11, focusing on the drivers and effects of capital flows and the challenges they pose for the...

Currency and financial turmoils in international capital markets have been the focus of an extensive theoretical research which started around 30 years ago. This paper provides a synthetic overview of this theoretical modeling. We analyze the basic analytical framework corresponding to the...

In order to protect the export and the import-competing sector of the economy, RBI often intervenes in the foreign-exchange market. Also, through daily operation of Liquidity Adjustment Facility (LAF), RBI regulates the interest rate. In this theoretical paper, I access the impact of...

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 global...

This paper studies export adjustment to negative shocks in currency unions. I consider the hitherto ignored role of trade costs and taxes in internal devaluations, which have been brought to the fore of international policy during the recent euro periphery crisis. Trade costs can limit the...

This study provides novel evidence on the impact of labor market institutions on current account dynamics. Our results suggest that a high degree of coordination of wage bargaining has a positive effect on the current account balance over the long run. This result is not driven entirely by wage...