This paper examines the relationship between the exchange rate regime and the pace of current account adjustment. The panel data set we refer to includes 11 catching-up countries from central, eastern and south-eastern Europe between 1994 and 2007. The exchange rate regime is measured by a...

Rising current account and merchandise trade imbalances marked the years before the global financial and economic crisis. These imbalances either contributed to or precipitated the crisis and to the extent that they create systemic risks, it is desirable that they be reduced. There are many...

In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–99, 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...

This paper describes a new analytical framework for the quantitative assessment of international external positions. The framework links each country's current net foreign asset position to its current trade flows, forecasts of future trade flows, and expectations concerning future returns on...

The external current account deficit of the United States reached 6.5% of GDP in 2006, the largest deficit in more than fifty years. Some observers have argued that this situation could be sustained indefinitely. Most analysts, however, believe that the external deficit is unsustainable and that...

The impact of an unanticipated monetary shock in a small open economy with dollarization, factor price rigidities, and nontradeables is re-examined in an optimizing intertemporal general equilibrium model. The framework of an earlier study is extended to incorporate foreign real money balances...

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...

The United States has a large and persistent current account deficit. Yet, U.S.'s income receipts from the rest of the world have exceeded its income payments to the rest of the world for many years. This appears to be paradoxical because for a country with a negative net foreign assets...

This paper investigates the factors behind the significant improvement in Brazil's external accounts and wide fluctuations of the real exchange rate since the floating of the real in 1999. Particular attention is devoted to the strong appreciation of the real from 2003-05. Econometric estimates...

This paper examines the effects of border-adjusted consumption taxes (mainly value added taxes or VATs) in a sample of 34 advanced economies from 1970 through 2015. We find that the real exchange rate tends to rise by the full amount of any consumption tax increase, with little effect on the...