This paper reviews the central features of France’s capital controls in the 70's and 80's and strives to assess their ability, in the context of various exchange rate mechanisms, to regulate capital flows and to stabilize the exchange rate while allowing France to preserve a measure of...

This paper reviews the economic and monetary impacts of the creation of the 1979 European Monetary System on the participating countries and shows that they did not meet all the required theoretical criteria for a successful monetary integration process. Despite this handicap, the 1979 monetary...

Maturity transformation coupled with open foreign exchange positions expose financial intermediaries to unexpected changes in interest and exchange rates. This paper proposes to measure the degree of banks exposure to market risks by taking the variance of the total differential of the bank...

This paper contrasts the poor performance of African economies over the past 30 years with the remarkable development of East Asian newly industrialized countries. It provides evidence that the lack of diversification, stemming from the adoption of inward-looking strategies, interventionist...

The question whether the European Monetary System has brought about a reduction in the variability of its members' exchange rates is not a trivial issue since central rates are adjustable and bilateral exchange rates are allowed to move freely within fairly large margins. In this paper I have...

Following the high variability of floating exchange rates after the collapse of the Bretton-Wood System, policymakers have increasingly relied on weighted exchange rate indexes (nominal effective exchange rate index) or indexes of competitiveness (real effective exchange rate or...

This paper analyzes the Eurodollar market, investigating the reasons for its expansion after 1973, and the consequences for monetary policy. In the first part of the paper, the issue of credit and money creation by offshore banks is considered. The nature of the liquidity creation process is...

Whether the prospective shift of the peg of the CFA franc to the euro would constitute an exchange rate arrangement with EMU countries would depend critically on the interpretation of the free convertibility of the CFA franc guaranteed by France. Nonetheless, this shift is likely to leave the...

This paper investigates the issue of monetary interdependence among members of the European Monetary System over the period 1979–91 and the leadership role attributed to the German central bank in the process of monetary integration, and looks for possible changes in central banks’...