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This book is about the history of thought and policy on the international adjustment mechanism. Economics emerged as a discipline in its own right largely out of the accumulated reflections, analyses and judgements of a group of writers from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century who shared a common perspective on matters relating to the adjustment of the balance of payments. The present survey starts with the development of the doctrine at that time and continues the story up to the present debate on economic and monetary union in Europe.
This study is about the history of thought and policy on the international adjustment mechanism - the changing conceptions about what economic forces come into play to adjust economies to external disequlibria, for example - payments surpluses and deficits or exchange-rate misalignments.
The papers collected in this volume are those presented at the fourteenth Colloquium arranged by the Societe Universitaire Europeenne de Recher ches Financieres (SUERF), which took place in Helsinki in May 1988. The Society is supported by a large number of central banks and commercial banks, by other financial and business institutions and by personal subscriptions from academics and others interested in monetary and financial problems. Since its establishment in 1963 it has developed as a forum for the exchange of information, research results and ideas among academics and practitioners in these fields, including central bank officials and civil servants responsible for formulating and applying monetary and financial policies, national and international. A major activity of SUERF is to organise and conduct Colloquia on subjects of topical interest to its members. The titles, places and dates of previous Colloquia for which volumes of the collected papers were published are noted, on the last page of this volume. Volumes were not produced for Colloquia held at Tarragona, Spain in October 1970 under the title "Monetary Policy and New Developments in Banking" and at Strasbourg, France in January 1972 under the title "Aspects of European Monetary Union".
This paper studies the mechanisms of international payments adjustment at work under the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, 1945 to 1971. I argue that two market failures, imperfect international capital mobility and imperfect wage-price flexibility, are central to understanding the adjustment problems of that period. Imperfect capital mobility implied that even intertemporally solvent governments could face international liquidity constraints. Wage-price inflexibility implied that countries suffering from simultaneous reserve loss and unemployment might need to undergo lengthy transitions before returning to balance. By the 1960s, when trade had been substantially liberalized and partial convertibility restored, the main remaining adjustment weapon was currency realignment: devaluation could eliminate an unemployment-cum-deficit dilemma in a stroke, while revaluation could relieve the inflationary pressures in surplus countries. The currency-realignment option proved incompatible with the growing efficiency of the international capital market, however. Under the classical gold standard, high capital mobility had supported the credibility of fixed exchange rates. Under Bretton Woods fixed gold parities did not have primacy among other economic objectives; and increasing capital mobility undermined the regime as governments proved unwilling to stand by key systemic commitments.