The Stability of Currency Boards
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A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Stukenbrock, Kai Book — Digitized Version The Stability of Currency Boards cege-Schriften, No. 8 Provided in Cooperation with: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers Suggested Citation: Stukenbrock, Kai (2004) : The Stability of Currency Boards, cege-Schriften, No. 8, ISBN 978-3-631-75699-7, Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, Berlin, http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/b14167 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/182695 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ www.econstor.eu CEGE-SCHRIFTEN Kai Stukenbrock The Stability of Currency Boards CEGE-SCHRIFTEN Kai Stukenbrock The Stability of Currency Boards The 1990s saw a revival of the currency board system, and proponents have advocated it as an easy-to-set-up exchange rate arrangement providing effective stabilization of the economy. However, the experience of Argentina has highlighted the risks of having a currency board. This study presents both the potential benefits, as well as the risks, of having a currency board by examining the stability of the currency board arrangement and identifying factors affecting the stability. The analysis is based on second-generation currency crisis models, extended to incorporate currency-board specific features and to account for particular aspects often found in currency-board economies. Kai Stukenbrock was born in Bremen in 1971. Starting in 1992, he studied economics at the University of Göttingen and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1997 he became a research fellow at the University of Göttingen, where he earned his doctorate. Since 2002 the author has been working as a rating specialist in sovereign ratings for a financial service provider in London. The Stability of Currency Boards 84&-Schriften Center for Globalization and Europeanization of the Economy Zentrum fiir Globolisierung und Europiiisierung der Wirtschoft Georg-August-Universitiit Gollingen Band 8 Herousgegeben von Wolfgang Benner, Gunter Gobisch, Jorg Gu6efeldt, Helmut Hesse, Hons-Joachim Jarchow, Renate Ohr, Helga Pollak, Peter Ruhmann, Hermann Sautter, Stefan Tangermann und Wilhelm H. Wacker Verantwortlicher Herousgeber fur diesen Band: Hermann Saulter £ PETER LANG Frankfurt om Main • Berlin • Bern• Bruxelles • New York • Oxford · Wien Kai Stukenbrock The Stability of Currency Boards ~ PETER LANG Europiiischer Verlag der Wissenschalten Bibliographic Information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at <http://dnb.ddb.de>. Open Access: The online version of this publication is published on www.peterlang.com and www.econstor.eu under the interna- tional Creative Commons License CC-BY 4.0. Learn more on how you can use and share this work: http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0. :£ This book is available Open Access thanks to the kind support of ZBW – Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. Zugl.: Gottingen, Univ., Diss., 2003 D7 ISSN 1617-741X ISBN 3-631-52031-X US-ISBN 0-8204-6548-8 ISBN 978-3-631-75699-7 (eBook) © Peter Lang GmbH Europaischer Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2004 All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany 1 2 4 5 6 7 www.peterlang.de Editor's Preface Currency boards have a long and intriguing history as monetary and exchange rate arrangements in many parts of the world. They have repeatedly gone out of fashion, just to resurface again a while later. The latest wave of currency board introduction started in the last decade of the twentieth century, when Argentina pegged its peso to the US dollar in 1991, to end a long period of rampant hyperinflation. The Argentinean currency board was soon followed by corresponding institution in Estonia (1992), Lithuania (1994), Bulgaria, and Bosnia (both 1997), where political and economic transformation posed enormous challenges to economic and monetary policy. Currency boards assume a prominent position in the ongoing discussion about the merits of fixed versus flexible exchange rates, especially considering the prevalent notion that countries should either opt for truly flexible or truly fixed exchange rates, but avoid the middle ground. In this context, currency boards present the most rigidly fixed exchange rate arrangement short of a monetary union, yet they allow a country to retain its domestic currency. However, not only since the Argentinean debt default in 2001 and the ensuing abandonment of the currency board have economists been aware of and have discussed the stability and the inherent risks of adopting a currency board. This thesis examines in great details the stabilizing effects resulting from the introduction of a currency board, and demonstrates how its design fea- tures, as well as the economic environment it operates in affect its long-term sustainability. The author shows that short-term stabilization, e.g. after hy- perinflation, can almost always be achieved by means of a currency board; the barriers to exit have just to be set high enough. The countries to benefit most from currency board introduction are those, where the political as well as economic environment tend to foster high inflation. However, this blessing derived from high barriers to exit may well turn into a curse when the combi- nation of a currency board and a non-accommodative economic environment lead to mounting real imbalances in the economy. The high barriers to exit lead policymakers to adhere to the currency board much longer than to a conventional fixed exchange rate, so that once the currency board is aban- 6 EDITOR'S PREFACE cloned due to economic pressures, the exit is often accompanied by economic collapse, as was recently the case in Argentina. Therefore, to ensure the sustainability of a board, a number of preconditions have to be met, such as restrictive fiscal policy, flexible goods and labor markets, a robust financial sector, and the choice of an adequate anchor currency. The author extends the economic model applied to examine the stability of currency boards to also consider the effects resulting from dollarization of the economy, specifically the effects from the presence of foreign-currency denominated debt. This is a feature often associated with currency board countries, since the anchor currency tends to circulate in parallel with the domestic currency, as was the case e.g. in Argentina, where the dollar was even made legal tender. General knowledge would suggest that the presence of foreign-currency debt in the economy should provide policymakers with an additional deterrent to abandoning the currency board, since a devaluation of the domestic currency leads to an increase in the real value of such debt. And this conclusion is generally confirmed by the extended model. However, the author demonstrates that in certain cases, where the stock of foreign- currency denominated debt is relatively low, the presence of such debt may have just the opposite effect on the stability of the board and may actually reduce the its sustainability. It is unlikely that a definitive and authoritative answer can be found to the question which exchange rate arrangement is right. However, it is important to understand what consequences the choice of a particular exchange rate arrangement entails. In most of the literature on exchange rates the specific details of currency boards that distinguish them from other fixed exchange rates are not considered. The author of this thesis provides a valuable con- tribution to the literature on exchange rates in general, and the literature on currency boards in particular, by the in-depth modelling and examination of currency boards' stability and dynamics, and by extending his analysis beyond the currency board literature so far. Prof. Dr. Hermann Sautter Gottingen, October 2003 Meinen Eltern in Dankbarkeit fiir Herz und Verstand Author's Preface Writing a doctoral thesis was a wondrous thing for me: I started out with a time horizon extending far beyond any other continuous