Download Free Regional Currency Areas And The Use Of Foreign Currencies Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Regional Currency Areas And The Use Of Foreign Currencies and write the review.

Arrangements that replace independent national currencies (regional currency areas, currency boards, official or unofficial use of a foreign currency) have become increasingly popular. However, they raise at least three broad questions. First, do their benefits (notably lower transactions costs) exceed the costs (reduced policy flexibility)? Second, which of these regimes is most suitable for a particular economy? Third, must institutions be developed to ensure economic convergence and other complementary measures that will guarantee the success of a common currency, or are convergence and complementary measures a likely consequence of adopting a common currency? Senior central bankers from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the United States discussed experiences and research on these questions at a two-day meeting held at the BIS in September 2002. The first day focused on economic issues and the second on legal and practical issues.
National currencies appear to be threatened from all sides. European Union member countries are due to abandon their national currencies in favour of a supranational currency by the year 2000. Elsewhere, the use of foreign currencies within national economic spaces is on the increase, as shown by the growth of eurocurrency activity, and currency su
A comprehensive guide to the principles and practice of regional currencies. It shows how regional currencies can transform the lives and well-being of local communities, how they can sustain businesses, how local authorities can participate in their success and, consequently, why supporting regional currencies is of vital importance to the future of your community, region or country.
A model of optimum currency areas is presented using a general equilibrium model with regionally differentiated goods. The choice of a currency union depends upon the size of the underlying disturbances, the correlation between these disturbances, the costs of transactions across currencies, factor mobility across regions, and the interrelationships between demand for different goods. It is found that, while a currency union can raise the welfare of the regions within the union, it unambiguously lowers welfare for those outside the union.
This book argues for a new conceptual framework that analytically distinguishes between North-South monetary co-ordination, which involves an international key currency, and South-South arrangements between economies all marked by external indebtedness and the resulting macroeconomic instabilities ('original sin'). In this light, the book analyzes different types of monetary co-ordination, ranging from ad hoc exchange rate policy agreements to projects of a common supranational currency, and it examines selected regional cases in Eastern Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia.
The paper shows how-in a Merton-type model with bankruptcy-the currency composition of debt changes the risk profile of a company raising a given amount of financing, and thus affects the cost of debt. Foreign currency borrowing is cheaper when the exchange rate is positively correlated with the return on the company's assets, even if the company is not an exporter. Prudential regulations should therefore differentiate among loans depending on the extent to which borrowers have "natural hedges" of their foreign currency exposures.
Dollarization—the use of foreign currencies as a medium of exchange, store of value, or unit of account—is a notable feature of financial development under macroeconomically fragile conditions. It has emerged as a key factor explaining vulnerabilities and currency crises, which have long been observed in Latin America, parts of Asia, and Eastern Europe. Dollarization is also present, prominently, in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where it remains significant and persistent at over 30 percent rates for both bank loans and deposits—although it has not increased significantly since 2001. However, progress in reducing dollarization has lagged behind other regions and, in this regard, it is legitimate to ask whether this phenomenon is an important concern in SSA. This study fills a gap in the literature by analyzing these issues with specific reference to the SSA region on the basis of the evidence for the past decade.
Most trade is invoiced in very few currencies. Despite this, the Mundell-Fleming benchmark and its variants focus on pricing in the producer’s currency or in local currency. We model instead a ‘dominant currency paradigm’ for small open economies characterized by three features: pricing in a dominant currency; pricing complementarities, and imported input use in production. Under this paradigm: (a) the terms-of-trade is stable; (b) dominant currency exchange rate pass-through into export and import prices is high regardless of destination or origin of goods; (c) exchange rate pass-through of non-dominant currencies is small; (d) expenditure switching occurs mostly via imports, driven by the dollar exchange rate while exports respond weakly, if at all; (e) strengthening of the dominant currency relative to non-dominant ones can negatively impact global trade; (f) optimal monetary policy targets deviations from the law of one price arising from dominant currency fluctuations, in addition to the inflation and output gap. Using data from Colombia we document strong support for the dominant currency paradigm.