The Mirage of Floating Exchange Rates

Abstract

During the past few years, many countries have suffered severe currency and banking crises, producing a staggering toll on their economies, particularly in emerging-market countries. In many cases, the cost of restructuring the banking sector has been in excess of 20 per cent of GDP, and output declines in the wake of crisis have been as large as 14 per cent. An increasingly popular view blames fixed exchange rates, specifically “soft pegs, ” for these financial meltdowns. Not surprisingly, adherents to that view advise emerging markets to join the ranks of the United States and other industrial countries that have chosen to allow their currency to float freely. (See, for example, Goldstein 1999.) At first glance, the world—with the notable exception of Europe—does seem to be marching steadily towards floating exchange rate arrangements. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), 97 per cent of its member countries in 1970 were classified as having a pegged exchange rate; by 1980, that share had declined to 39 per cent, and in 1999, it was down to only 11 per cent. 1 Yet, this much-used IMF classification takes at face value that countries actually do what they say they do. Even a cursory perusal of the Asian crisis countries ’ exchange rates prior to the 1997 crisis would suggest that their exchange rates looked very much like pegs to the U.S. dollar for extended periods of time. Only Thailand, however, was explicitly classified as a peg; the Philippines was listed as having a freely floating

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