CURRENCY BOARD FINANCIAL STATEMENTS Currency Board Working Paper
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SAE./No.22/December 2014 Studies in Applied Economics CURRENCY BOARD FINANCIAL STATEMENTS Currency Board Working Paper Nicholas Krus and Kurt Schuler Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and Study of Business Enterprise & Center for Financial Stability Currency Board Financial Statements First version, December 2014 By Nicholas Krus and Kurt Schuler Paper and accompanying spreadsheets copyright 2014 by Nicholas Krus and Kurt Schuler. All rights reserved. Spreadsheets previously issued by other researchers are used by permission. About the series The Studies in Applied Economics of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health and the Study of Business Enterprise are under the general direction of Professor Steve H. Hanke, co-director of the Institute ([email protected]). This study is one in a series on currency boards for the Institute’s Currency Board Project. The series will fill gaps in the history, statistics, and scholarship of currency boards. This study is issued jointly with the Center for Financial Stability. The main summary data series will eventually be available in the Center’s Historical Financial Statistics data set. About the authors Nicholas Krus ([email protected]) is an Associate Analyst at Warner Music Group in New York. He has a bachelor’s degree in economics from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he also worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Applied Economics and the Study of Business Enterprise and did most of his research for this paper. Kurt Schuler ([email protected]) is Senior Fellow in Financial History at the Center for Financial Stability in New York. The views here do not necessarily reflect those of our institutions. Summary This paper and its accompanying spreadsheets are background material for a forthcoming book on currency boards by Steve H. Hanke, Nicholas Krus, and Kurt Schuler. The spreadsheets digitize financial data on individual currency boards. The data come mainly from the annual reports of currency boards; periodic financial statements in government gazettes; and the annual reports of British colonies, where currency boards were most prevalent. The paper explains how we standardized the financial data and offers facts necessary for a better understanding of the financial statements. We will update the paper as we accumulate further data or comments. Acknowledgments For obtaining otherwise inaccessible source documents, we thank Domingo Cavallo, Sir Roger Douglas, Horacio Liendo, and Stanley Fischer. For help compiling sources and data we thank Evan Adamo, Benedict Croak, Brandon Dixon, Rahee Jung, Ian Kolman, Nikolaos Kotoulas, Bryant Lie, Kotaro Mitsuhashi, Victor Molho, Seung Jae (Johnny) Oh, Andrew Rosenberg, Joohyun Shim, Oliver Simon, John Träger, Matthew Ulmann, Sean Villa, Charles Weintraub, and Kevin Zhang, and Yuxuan (Lily) Zhu. 1 Contents I. Description of the format for the country summaries Introduction Criteria for inclusion Spreadsheet files Original formats of currency board financial statements Format of the standardized balance sheet Format of the standardized income and expenditure statement Format of the entries on individual currency boards Copyright considerations II. Country summaries Argentina Bahamas Bahrain Currency Board (Bahrain, Abu Dhabi) Barbados Bermuda Bosnia and Herzegovina British Caribbean Currency Board (Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, British Guiana [now Guyana], Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago) British Guiana (now Guyana) British Honduras (now Belize) British Solomon Islands (now Solomon Islands) Brunei Bulgaria Burma (now Myanmar) Canada Cayman Islands Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) Cook Islands Cyprus Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) Djibouti East African Currency Board (Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar [now Tanzania], etc.) Estonia Falkland Islands Faroe Islands Fiji French Guiana Gambia Gibraltar Guernsey Hong Kong India Iraq Ireland Isle of Man Italian Somaliland (now southern Somalia) Jamaica 2 Jersey Jordan Kenya (East Africa Protectorate) Kuwait Latvia Libya Lithuania Macau (Macao) Maldives Malta Mauritius New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) New Zealand North Borneo (British North Borneo; now Sabah, part of Malaysia) North Russia (now Archangel-Murmansk region of Russia) Oman Palestine Currency Board (Palestine [now Israel, West Bank and Gaza], Transjordan [now Jordan]) Philippines Qatar and Dubai Currency Board (Qatar, Dubai [part of United Arab Emirates]) Saint Helena Sarawak (now part of Malaysia) Seychelles Singapore (period of own currency board, separate from Malaya) South Arabian Currency Authority / Southern Yemen Currency Authority (now part of Yemen) Southern Rhodesia Currency Board / Central Africa Currency Board (Northern Rhodesia [now Zambia], Nyasaland [now Malawi], Southern Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe]) Straits Settlements / Malaya (now Singapore and Malaysia) Sudan (now Sudan and South Sudan) Swaziland Thailand Tonga Trinidad and Tobago United Arab Emirates (really a central bank, even though its official title was a currency board) West African Currency Board (Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone) Western Samoa (now Samoa) Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen; now part of Yemen) Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) III. Spreadsheets (in accompanying folder or files) Workbooks on the currency boards, plus a summary workbook for currency in circulation. Some workbooks will not appear until later. 3 I. DESCRIPTION OF THE FORMAT FOR THE COUNTRY SUMMARIES Introduction This is a background paper for a book project on currency boards by Steve H. Hanke, Nicholas Krus, and Kurt Schuler. You need not read the paper to understand the book (which, as of 2014, is still being written). The paper, although dense and dry, is important because it contains facts necessary for a better understanding of the currency board financial statements that underlie some of the analysis in the book. Accompanying spreadsheets contain the raw data for individual currency boards and show how we standardized the data. The paper is based mainly on primary source material, especially annual reports, higher- frequency financial data from government gazettes, and laws. We searched libraries in the United States, England, and Australia, as well as the Internet and online databases, and made digital photographs or other digital copies for a permanent record of the source material. Material that is out of copyright is posted on the Web site of the Institute for Applied Economics and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University, under the heading “Digital Archive on Currency Boards.” Material still in copyright is on file at the Institute, available for researchers to consult under appropriate restrictions. Rahee Jung and Demilade Obayomi, two Johns Hopkins University students at the time, compiled the “Guide to the Digital Archive on Currency Boards” that appears in the Institute’s working paper series. Large currency boards published annual reports. Each annual report typically contains a brief narrative on the workings of the board; a balance sheet; a statement of income and expenditure; details about notes and coins in circulation, such as a breakdown of circulation by denomination; and, for many boards up through the 1960s, a list of the securities the board held as assets. Some reports also show subsidiary financial accounts with further details on assets, liabilities, income, and expenditures. Before the 1990s, currency board reports rarely included statistics of the financial sector more generally, and since this paper is concerned with the operation of the boards themselves, we usually say little about statistics of the wider financial sector. Small currency boards often limited their disclosure to a balance sheet published in the government gazette without a statement of income and expenditure or an accompanying narrative. Large and small currency boards alike also often published abbreviated financial statements in the gazettes monthly to semiannually. The abbreviated statements typically listed only the major headings in the balance sheet. We and obtained data from many government gazettes, but are still missing some data. The other major source of data for the boards that published no annual report was the annual colonial reports of British colonies. Some annual colonial reports entirely omitted data on currency board finances; others published only the amount of the note circulation and the reserve; and a few published what were in effect abbreviated balance sheets and statements of income and expenditure. Typically, data can be found in the sections of the reports discussing government finances; currency and banking; or the assets and liabilities of the colonial governments, where currency in circulation and currency board reserve funds sometimes appear as line items. Some colonies and countries also published official yearbooks or statistical abstracts, and almost all British colonies published annual statistical summaries known as Blue Books. We made use of them in some cases. From considerations of time, cost, and efficiency, we have limited our search to published material except in a small number of cases where it yielded very little data. For many currency boards, archives may contain unpublished data. The British National Archives would be the place to start for researchers interested in gathering unpublished data for many countries. The Bank of England archives also have many files related to currency