Laurissa Mühlich

Regional Monetary Integration Among Developing Countries: New Opportunities for Macroeconomic Stability Beyond the Theory of Optimum Currency Areas?

Optimum Currency Area (OCA) approaches turn to be inadequate in the analysis of the new regional monetary integration schemes that have sprung up among developing and emerging market economies. Instead, in accordance with the concept of ‘original sin’ (Eichengreen et al.) we argue that regional monetary South-South integration schemes that, unlike North-South arrangements, involve none of the international reserve currencies, have specific monetary constraints and implications which need to be duly considered. A first comparative analysis of three cases of monetary South-South cooperation in South Africa (CMA), East Asia (ASEAN) and Latin America (Mercosur) shows that these can indeed provide macroeconomic stability gains but that this strongly depends on the existence of economic hierarchies within these integration schemes.

Varieties of regional monetary cooperation: a tool for reducing volatility in developing economies?

Can regional monetary cooperation shield developing regions from global volatility? The article argues that the main contribution of regional monetary cooperation to enhancing the shock-buffering ability of its member countries is to provide short-term liquidity and to increase regional trade and financial links. In contrast, traditional optimum currency area (OCA) theories formulate the advantages of regional monetary cooperation in terms of allocative efficiency gains and aim at a full currency union as final stage. As such, traditional theory widely ignores the shock-buffering capacity of regional monetary cooperation as well as their varieties. In contrast, the article argues that intermediate stages of regional monetary cooperation have their own rationales related to such shock-buffering capacity. This paper systematically examines the variety of regional cooperation arrangements in the developing world that range from regional payments systems over the pooling of reserves to exchange rate coordination. We propose that the potential for shock buffering is dependent on the chosen form of cooperation. Furthermore, in contrast to full monetary integration, which is highly demanding in terms of policy coordination, the requirements for regional policy coordination are significantly lower, depending on the form and aim of the arrangement.

The IMF to the rescue: did Greece benefit from the fund’s experience in dealing with highly indebted countries?

The paper analyses how the IMF brought its experience concerning the distinction between liquidity and solvency crises and their adequate handling gained during earlier crises into the troika’s approach to Greece. We link multiple equilibria models with the IMF’s experience gained in Latin America in the 2000s and subsequent changes in the IMF’s policy guidelines. We show that the IMF changed its approach after the Argentinian crisis but ignored some of these insights in the case of Greece. Hence, we argue that the inclusion of the IMF in Europe’s crisis-fighting did not completely deliver what had been hoped for.

Regional Monetary Cooperation in Emerging, Transition, and Developing Economies

This chapter systematically examines the variety of regional cooperation arrangements in the developing world that range from regional payment systems over the pooling of reserves to exchange rate coordination. The main contribution of regional monetary cooperation to enhancing the shock buffering ability of its member countries is to provide short-term liquidity and to increase regional trade and financial links. The potential for shock buffering is dependent on the chosen form of regional monetary cooperation. In contrast to full monetary integration which is highly demanding in terms of policy coordination, the requirements for regional policy coordination are significantly lower, depending on the form and aim of regional monetary cooperation arrangements.

Fragile Financial Markets

In fact, in the economic literature, a remarkable consensus exists concerning the importance of financial market development in reducing adverse effects of economic and monetary shocks related to exchange rate changes in the presence of net balance sheet effects (cf. Levy-Yeyati, 2006; Aghion et al., 2009). The literature unambiguously highlights the importance of well-developed financial markets, in particular the development of local currency-denominated financial instruments, as highly relevant to mitigate the aforementioned adverse effects on net wealth and monetary policy constraints. [T]he development and active use of a fixed-rate local currency market for funding government and corporate financing needs is probably the single most important step an LDC [less developed country] can take in reducing its sensitivity to external shocks. (Pettis, 2001: 168)