This book combines currency matters with competitiveness considerations, with a view to raising the understanding of exchange rate dynamics and to analysing the role of exchange rates in reinforcing economic competitiveness.

This paper reviews the impact of the global economic and financial crisis on two distinct emerging market regions: Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (CESEE) and Latin America. Similar to other emerging economies, both regions were initially surprisingly resilient as the crisis gathered...

Sovereign external assets (SEAs) comprise foreign exchange reserves and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). The global stock of reserves reached 7 $trn in the second quarter of 2008, but data on SWF are rather elusive. Our estimation puts the SWFs at around 2,5 $trn dollars by 2007 and in the last...

This paper assesses whether domestic costs of reserve accumulation -and in particular monetary costs- constitute an eventual limit to the process in emerging markets. We find that sterilization is the first measure to deal with these costs. Then, we turn to study whether diminishing ability to...

Reserves and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) assets should be jointly considered for the assessment of global imbalances, hence their denomination as sovereign external assets (SEAs): both are public capital outflows from developing to developed countries, both hinder adjustment in current account...