An Economic History of West Africa

Truth or consequences.

International monetary arrangements for the 21st century

HE fall of convertibility in Argentina has stirred a lively discussion aboutthe causes for its collapse. Several explanations have been offered. Themost popular one relates to the unsustainable combination of a fixed exchangerate and large fiscal deficits that led to a rapid growth in public debt, severe fiscalproblems, and eventually, a loss of access to credit markets. Another popularview stresses the impact of devaluation by Argentina’s major trading partners asan important cause of real exchange rate (RER) misalignment, which reducedprofitability in the tradable sector. This, in turn, slowed down investment and ledthe economy into a protracted recession, with the associated deflation being themechanism for easing the RER disequilibrium.Here a different interpretation of the collapse of convertibility is provided,drawing heavily on recent work by Calvo et al. (2002). This interpretation shareswith the previous views the acknowledgement of fiscal sustainability problemsand RER misalignment. However, this view places special emphasis on financialconsiderations. In particular, it is argued that the impact of RER misalignmentwent beyond considerations of trade and competitiveness. It played a major rolein the fiscal and financial problems that eventually Argentina had to confront.Moreover, fixed exchange rates helped conceal those problems and, as a result,necessary fiscal measures were postponed, thereby intensifying the crisis.

Sudden Stops, the Real Exchange Rate and Fiscal Sustainability in Argentina

An economic history of Nigeria, 1860–1960

We provide a bibliography of major scholarly writings and many minor writings on currency boards up to mid 2011. Our bibliography incorporates two previous bibliographies on currency boards. Dr. Kurt Schuler’s 1992 Ph.D. dissertation on the history of currency boards compiled a list of works on currency boards up to then. Schuler listed a number of annual reports of currency boards and other primary sources, but concentrated on scholarly writings by economists in books and economic journals. He relied in part on a 1959 bibliography by the English economist Arthur Hazlewood on the economics of underdeveloped areas, which included a number of references relevant to currency boards. Schuler compiled his bibliography at the end of a long period in which economists had paid little attention to currency boards, and several years before Internet search engines became useful tools for bibliographical research in economics.

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Douglas Rodgers

Papers

On Currency Boards – An Updated Bibliography of Scholarly Writings