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Four different schemes for classifying exchange rate regimes are compared for developing countries. Disagreements are substantial, and alternative schemes disagree as much with each other as with the official scheme. Only the official scheme shows a trend towards floating.

The paper uses a comprehensive data set with bilateral direct investment flows and establishes the influence of the de-facto exchange rate regime for FDI flows. We find a strong and significant effect from fixed rates on bilateral FDI flows in developed economies, but no significant effect for developing countries. There is thus no general and uniform impact of stable exchange rates on FDI. We provide several possible explanations for this difference.

The paper uses a comprehensive data set with bilateral direct investment flows and establishes the influence of the de-facto exchange rate regime for FDI flows. We find a strong and significant effect from fixed rates on bilateral FDI flows in developed economies, but no significant effect for developing countries. There is thus no general and uniform impact of stable exchange rates on FDI. We provide several possible explanations for this difference.

This paper studies the Balassa–Samuelson effects in two areas with strong differences in economic development, sixteen OECD countries and sixteen Latin American economies. The USA is taken as a benchmark. Applying recent panel cointegration and bootstrapping techniques that solve for cross-sectional dependence and small panel size problems, we find some evidence for not rejecting the whole hypothesis in the LA area. In the context of OECD group, the second stage of the BS hypothesis, which relates relative sector prices with the real exchange rate, does not hold, probably because national markets remain to some extent segmented, as reflected in departures from PPP in the tradable sectors.

We argue that a higher share of the private sector in a country's external debt raises the incentive to stabilize the exchange rate. We present a simple model in which exchange rate volatility does not affect agents' welfare if all the debt is incurred by the government. Once we introduce private banks who borrow in foreign currency and lend to domestic firms, the monetary authority has an incentive to dampen the distributional consequences of exchange rate fluctuations. Our empirical results support the hypothesis that not only the level, but also the composition of foreign debt matters for exchange-rate policy.

CESifo Working Paper No. 2255; International audience; The aim of this paper is to apply recently developed panel cointegration techniques proposed by Pedroni (1999, 2004) and generalized by Banerjee and Carrion-i-Silvestre (2006) to examine the robustness of the PPP concept for a sample of 80 developed and developing countries. We find that strong PPP is verified for OECD countries and weak PPP for MENA countries. However in African, Asian, Latin American and Central and Eastern European countries, PPP does not seem relevant to characterize the long-run behavior of the real exchange rate. Further investigations indicate that the nature of the exchange rate regime doesn't condition the validity of PPP which is more easily accepted in countries with high than low inflation.

This paper studies the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis in two areas with strong differences in economic development, sixteen OECD countries and sixteen Latin American economies. Applying panel cointegration and bootstrapping techniques that solve for cross-sectional dependence problems in the data, we find that the second stage of the hypothesis, which relates relative sector prices with the real exchange rate, only holds in the Latin American area. The failure of the latter in the OECD countries as a whole is reflected in departures from PPP in the tradable sectors, and is probably due to segmentation between national tradable markets.

The paper analyzes the relation between institutional quality, such as corruption, in a country and its monetary regime. It is shown that a credibly fixed exchange rate to a low inflation country, like a currency board, can reduce corruption and improve the fiscal system. A monetary union, however, has ambiguous effects. I find that there is convergence between countries with regard to the level of corruption.

Official and four alternative regime classification schemes based on observed exchange rate behaviour are used to examine the relationship with inflation and growth in developing countries. For an identical sample of observations from 73 countries for 1984-2001, only the scheme based on parallel rates suggests a significant effect (negative) of floating on growth. Floats that claim to be pegs, or have high exchange rate volatility, are the ones with lower growth. Hard pegs offer inflation benefits. Floating is not consistently associated with higher inflation than soft pegs, and any apparent association is a possible by-product of the design of the classification algorithms.

This paper uses a panel probit model with simultaneous equations to explain the joint determination of de facto and de jure exchange rate regimes in developing countries since 1980. We also derive an ordered-choice panel probit model to explain the causes of discrepancies between the two regime choices. Both models are estimated using simulation-based maximum likelihood methodsl. The results of the simultaneous equations model suggest that the two regime choices are dependent of each other and exhibit considerable state dependence. The ordered probit model provides evidence that regime discrepancies reflect an error-correction mechanism, and the discrepancies are persistent over time.

This paper analyses the choices of exchange rate regimes in developing countries since 1980. Static and dynamic random-effects multinominal panel models are estimated using simulation-based techniques. Explanatory variables include OCA fundamentals, stabilization considerations, currency crises factors, and political and institutional features. The results reveal strong state dependence in regime choices.