Taiyo Yoshimi

Analysis on β and σ Convergences of East Asian Currencies

This paper focuses on recent events which include the RMB reform in China and the global financial crisis to investigate statistically recent diverging trends among East Asian currencies. For the purpose, their weighted average value (Asian Monetary Unit: AMU) and their deviations (AMU Deviation Indicators) from benchmark levels are used to analyze both β and σ convergences of East Asian currencies. Our analytical results show that the monetary authority of China has still kept stabilizing the exchange rate of the Chinese yuan against only the US dollar even though it announced its adoption of a managed floating exchange rate system with reference to a currency basket. Analytical results on β and σ convergences show that deviations among the East Asian currencies have been diverging in recent years, especially after 2005. The widening deviations reflect not the RMB reform but recent international capital flows and the global financial crisis. In addition, it is important as its background that the monetary authorities of the countries are adopting a variety of exchange rate systems. In other words, a coordination failure in adopting exchange rate systems among these monetary authorities increases volatility and misalignment of intraregional exchange rates in East Asia.

Welfare Implications of Currency Integration: Labor Mobility and Pricing-to-Market

Abstract In this paper, we examine the welfare cost of renouncing monetary policy autonomy in a model that includes labor mobility and pricing-to-market (PTM) behavior in firms. We find that renouncing monetary policy autonomy becomes a cost of currency integration when the consumption basket weights differ between candidate countries and when country-specific total factor productivity (TFP) shocks hit economies, even when the union fulfills the classic optimum currency area theory of labor mobility. We also found that a firms PTM behavior has a significant effect on the welfare implications of currency integration combined with labor mobility. For instance, currency integration does not produce greater welfare losses in the PTM case (where the labor input weights differ across member countries and asymmetric labor disutility shocks occur), although greater welfare losses arise in the case of producer currency pricing.