Prospective Deficits and the Asian Currency Crisis


Book Description

The recent Asian currency crisis was caused by large prospective fiscal deficits associated with implicit bailout guarantees to failing banking systems. Absent the political will to raise taxes or cut spending, governments must resort to seignorage revenues to pay for the bailout of the banking system. In a world of forward-looking agents, this makes a currency crisis inevitable.










Currencies, Crises, Fiscal Policy, and Coordination


Book Description

This volume provides an integrated compilation of selected major articles published by the author in several fields of international finance. These include contributions to the understanding of currency crises and financial contagion, the evolution of exchange rate regimes, the interaction between national fiscal policies and regional monetary unions, and the effect of uncertainty on the gains from international economic policy coordination. The author spent most of his career doing research at established institutions (the Bank of Canada, OECD, and IMF), and these articles emerged from the need to understand the major economic policy issues of the day. In the book's introduction, the author discusses the motivation for these contributions and the unifying themes that emerged, while a concluding chapter provides his personal reflections and suggestions about promising avenues for further research.




Currency Crises in Emerging Markets


Book Description

Currency Crises in Emerging Markets, prepared by Warsaw-based Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE), discusses various aspects of currency crises in emerging-market economies: The definitions and theoretical models of currency crises, the causes, management and propagation (contagion effect) of crises, their economic, social and policy consequences, the role of international financial institutions, and crisis prevention. In addition, five case studies of currency crises in Central and Eastern Europe are presented.




Leading Indicators of Currency Crises


Book Description

This paper examines the empirical evidence on currency crises and proposes a specific early warning system. This system involves monitoring the evolution of several indicators that tend to exhibit an unusual behavior in the periods preceding a crisis. When an indicator exceeds a certain threshold value, this is interpreted as a warning “signal” that a currency crisis may take place within the following 24 months. The variables that have the best track record within this approach include exports, deviations of the real exchange rate from trend, the ratio of broad money to gross international reserves, output, and equity prices.




Multiple Exchange Rates, Fiscal Deficits and Inflation Dynamics


Book Description

The paper explores the inflationary implications of exchange rate regime reforms in a small open economy model combining the public finance view of inflation with multiple exchange markets. To account for the experience of many developing countries, the analysis focuses on transitions to multiple official exchange markets. In those countries, multiple exchange rates were often announced as temporary. The paper shows that the dynamic response of inflation to the reform markedly differ whether the announcement is credible or not. The paper also compares the response of inflation under a fixed crawl of nominal official rates and under the presence of policy rules aimed at reducing the spread between the official and parallel exchange rates.







Hyperinflation, Currency Board, and Bust


Book Description

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--Universiteat Hohenheim, 2006.