Approaches To Exchange Rate Policy

External sector policies and exchange rate policy are central to a country's economic performance and to the IMF's surveillance functions. The papers in this book, edited by Richard Barth and Chorng-Huey Wong, were presented at a seminar on Exchange Rate Policy in Developing and Transition Economies held by the IMF Institute. They analyze choices of exchange rate regimes, issues affecting management of exchange regimes, and specific types of regimes, including case studies from the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The politics surrounding exchange rate policies in the global economy The exchange rate is the most important price in any economy, since it affects all other prices. Exchange rates are set, either directly or indirectly, by government policy. Exchange rates are also central to the global economy, for they profoundly influence all international economic activity. Despite the critical role of exchange rate policy, there are few definitive explanations of why governments choose the currency policies they do. Filled with in-depth cases and examples, Currency Politics presents a comprehensive analysis of the politics surrounding exchange rates. Identifying the motivations for currency policy preferences on the part of industries seeking to influence politicians, Jeffry Frieden shows how each industry's characteristics—including its exposure to currency risk and the price effects of exchange rate movements—determine those preferences. Frieden evaluates the accuracy of his theoretical arguments in a variety of historical and geographical settings: he looks at the politics of the gold standard, particularly in the United States, and he examines the political economy of European monetary integration. He also analyzes the politics of Latin American currency policy over the past forty years, and focuses on the daunting currency crises that have frequently debilitated Latin American nations, including Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. With an ambitious mix of narrative and statistical investigation, Currency Politics clarifies the political and economic determinants of exchange rate policies.

Praise for Handbook of Exchange Rates “This book is remarkable. I expect it to become the anchor reference for people working in the foreign exchange field.” —Richard K. Lyons, Dean and Professor of Finance, Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley “It is quite easily the most wide ranging treaty of expertise on the forex market I have ever come across. I will be keeping a copy close to my fingertips.” —Jim O’Neill, Chairman, Goldman Sachs Asset Management How should we evaluate the forecasting power of models? What are appropriate loss functions for major market participants? Is the exchange rate the only means of adjustment? Handbook of Exchange Rates answers these questions and many more, equipping readers with the relevant concepts and policies for working in today’s international economic climate. Featuring contributions written by leading specialists from the global financial arena, this handbook provides a collection of original ideas on foreign exchange (FX) rates in four succinct sections: • Overview introduces the history of the FX market and exchange rate regimes, discussing key instruments in the trading environment as well as macro and micro approaches to FX determination. • Exchange Rate Models and Methods focuses on forecasting exchange rates, featuring methodological contributions on the statistical methods for evaluating forecast performance, parity relationships, fair value models, and flow–based models. • FX Markets and Products outlines active currency management, currency hedging, hedge accounting; high frequency and algorithmic trading in FX; and FX strategy-based products. • FX Markets and Policy explores the current policies in place in global markets and presents a framework for analyzing financial crises. Throughout the book, topics are explored in-depth alongside their founding principles. Each chapter uses real-world examples from the financial industry and concludes with a summary that outlines key points and concepts. Handbook of Exchange Rates is an essential reference for fund managers and investors as well as practitioners and researchers working in finance, banking, business, and econometrics. The book also serves as a valuable supplement for courses on economics, business, and international finance at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels.

First published in 2007. Exchange Rate Economics: Theories and Evidence is the second edition of Floating Exchange Rates: Theories and Evidence, and builds on the successful content and structure of the previous edition, but has been comprehensively updated and expanded to include additional literature on the determination of both fixed and floating exchange rates. Core topics covered include: • the purchasing power parity hypothesis and the PPP puzzle; • the monetary and portfolio-balance approaches to exchange rates; • the new open economy macroeconomics approach to exchange rates; and • the determination of exchange rates in target zone models and speculative attack models. Exchange Rate Economics: Theories and Evidence also includes extensive discussion of recent econometric work on exchange rates with a particular focus on equilibrium exchange rates and measuring exchange rate misalignment, as well as discussion on the non-fundamentals-based approaches to exchange rate behaviour, such as the market microstructure approach. The book will appeal to academics and postgraduate students with an interest in all aspects of international finance and will also be of interest to practitioners concerned with issues relating to equilibrium exchange rates and the forecastability of currencies in terms of macroeconomic fundamentals.

''In summary, the book is valuable as a textbook both at the advanced undergraduate level and at the graduate level. It is also very useful for the economist who wants to be brought up-to-date on theoretical and empirical research on exchange rate behaviour.'' ""Journal of International Economics""

This volume contains the papers presented and comments made at two conferences on the controversial subject of greater flexibility of exchange rates. The first of the conferences was held at Oyster Bay, New York, early in 1969, the second at Bürgenstock, Switzerland, in the summer of 1969. One half of the 40 conferees were academic economists, the others were practitioners of the foreign exchange markets, mostly bankers and a few executives of international business firms. Both the opposition to greater flexibility of exchange rates and the advocacy of more flexible systems are represented in these papers. The contrast between fixed or jumping exchange rates and gliding exchange rates is clearly described and the various systems of increased flexibility, such as the "wider band" and the "crawling peg," are explained and examined. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Modern macroeconomic theory teaches us new lessons about exchange rates: Currency depreciations or appreciations that change the relative competitiveness of producers in different countries are undesirable from a global perspective if they lead to relative prices that do not reflect the true relative costs of production. ¿External balance¿ does not mean that trade balances should be zero, but rather that global resources are allocated efficiently. The implications of this insight for the role of the exchange rate in monetary policy are explored here. Some of the traditional arguments for purely floating exchange rates are challenged by this approach. Also briefly considers sterilized intervention and comments on the role of international reserves.