Publication:
Does the Exchange Rate Regime Affect Macroeconomic Performance : Evidence from Transition Economics

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (3.48 MB)
444 downloads
English Text (140.23 KB)
90 downloads
Published
2001-07
ISSN
Date
2014-08-21
Editor(s)
Abstract
To examine whether a country's exchange rate regime has any impact on inflation and growth performance in transition economies, the authors develop an empirical framework that addresses some of the main problems plaguing empirical work in this strand of the literature: the Lucas critique, the endogeneity of the exchange rate regime, and the sample selection problem. Empirical results demonstrate that the exchange rate regime does affect inflation performance. the results suggest that: 1) Transition countries with intermediate arrangements might reduce inflation if they were to adopt a fixed regime. 2) Switching from a floating regime to an intermediate regime might not reduce inflation. 3) An unanticipated float--when a country whose fundamentals make it unlikely to adopt another regime adopts a floating regime--results in lower inflation. Based on their results, it is not possible to infer more about one particular exchange rate regime being superior to another in terms of growth performance. But empirical findings do underscore the different effects that policy variables--and other variables influencing economic activity--have on growth under different exchange-rate arrangements.
Link to Data Set
Citation
Domac, Ilker; Peters, Kyle; Yuzefovich, Yevgeny. 2001. Does the Exchange Rate Regime Affect Macroeconomic Performance : Evidence from Transition Economics. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 2642. © http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19572 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
  • Publication
    Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05) Foster, Elizabeth; Jolliffe, Dean Mitchell; Lara Ibarra, Gabriel; Lakner, Christoph; Tettah-Baah, Samuel
    Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.
  • Publication
    The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29) Abalo, Kodzovi; Boehlert, Brent; Bui, Thanh; Burns, Andrew; Castillo, Diego; Chewpreecha, Unnada; Haider, Alexander; Hallegatte, Stephane; Jooste, Charl; McIsaac, Florent; Ruberl, Heather; Smet, Kim; Strzepek, Ken
    Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.
  • Publication
    Gender Gaps in the Performance of Small Firms: Evidence from Urban Peru
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-09-23) Celiku, Bledi; Ubfal, Diego; Valdivia, Martin
    This paper estimates the gender gap in the performance of firms in Peru using representative data on both formal and informal firms. On average, informal female-led firms have lower sales, labor productivity, and profits compared to their male-led counterparts, with differences more pronounced when controlling for observable determinants of firm performance. However, gender gaps are only significant at the bottom of the performance distribution of informal firms, and these gaps disappear at the top of the distribution of informal firms and for formal firms. Possible explanations for the performance gaps at the bottom of the distribution include the higher likelihood of small, female-led firms being home-based, which is linked to lower profits, and their concentration in less profitable sectors. The paper provides suggestive evidence that household responsibilities play a key role in explaining the gender gap in firm performance among informal firms. Therefore, policies that promote access to care services or foster a more equal distribution of household activities may reduce gender productivity gaps and allow for a more efficient allocation of resources.
  • Publication
    The Exposure of Workers to Artificial Intelligence in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-05) Demombynes, Gabriel; Langbein, Jörg; Weber, Michael
    Research on the labor market implications of artificial intelligence has focused principally on high-income countries. This paper analyzes this issue using microdata from a large set of low- and middle-income countries, applying a measure of potential artificial intelligence occupational exposure to a harmonized set of labor force surveys for 25 countries, covering a population of 3.5 billion people. The approach advances work by using harmonized microdata at the level of individual workers, which allows for a multivariate analysis of factors associated with exposure. Additionally, unlike earlier papers, the paper uses highly detailed (4 digit) occupation codes, which provide a more reliable mapping of artificial intelligence exposure to occupation. Results within countries, show that artificial intelligence exposure is higher for women, urban workers, and those with higher education. Exposure decreases by country income level, with high exposure for just 12 percent of workers in low-income countries and 15 percent of workers in lower-middle-income countries. Furthermore, lack of access to electricity limits effective exposure in low-income countries. These results suggest that for developing countries, and in particular low-income countries, the labor market impacts of artificial intelligence will be more limited than in high-income countries. While greater exposure to artificial intelligence indicates larger potential for future changes in certain occupations, it does not equate to job loss, as it could result in augmentation of worker productivity, automation of some tasks, or both.
  • Publication
    Geopolitical Risks and Trade
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-09-23) Mulabdic, Alen; Yotov, Yoto V.
    This paper studies the impact of geopolitical risks on international trade, using the Geopolitical Risk (GPR) index of Caldara and Iacoviello (2022) and an empirical gravity model. The impact of spikes in geopolitical risk on trade is negative, strong, and heterogeneous across sectors. The findings show that increases in geopolitical risk reduce trade by about 30 to 40 percent. These effects are equivalent to an increase of global tariffs of up to 14 percent. Services trade is most vulnerable to geopolitical risks, followed by agriculture, and the impact on manufacturing trade is moderate. These negative effects are partially mitigated by cultural and geographic proximity, as well as by the presence of trade agreements.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    Banking Crises and Exchange Rate Regimes : Is There a Link?
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2000-11) Domac, Ilker; Martinez Peria, Maria Soledad
    The authors investigate the links between banking crises, and exchange rate regimes, using a comprehensive data set that includes developed, and developing countries over the last two decades. In particular, they examine whether the choice of exchange rate regime affects the likelihood, cost, and duration of banking crises. Empirical results indicate that adopting a fixed exchange rate, diminishes the likelihood of a banking crisis in developing countries. But once a banking crisis occurs, its real costs - in terms of forgone output growth - are higher for countries with more stringent exchange rate requirements. The duration of crises seems not to be affected by exchange rate policy. Instead, it is influenced mainly by the size of the credit boom before the crisis.
  • Publication
    Exchange Rate Overvaluation and Trade Protection
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2000-02) Shatz, Howard J.; Tarr, David G.
    Despite a trend toward more flexible rates, more than half the world's countries maintain fixed or managed exchange rates. In the 1980s and 1990s, developing countries as a group progressively liberalized their trade regimes, but some governments defend their exchange rate in actions that run counter to long-run plans for liberalization. Without discussing the relative merits of fixed and flexible exchange rate systems, the authors note that exchange rate management in many countries has resulted in overvaluation of the real exchange rate. Roughly twenty five percent of the countries for which data are available have overvalued exchange rates, with black market premiums from 10 percent to more than 100 percent. After surveying the literature, the authors present lessons from experience about what has worked (or not) in response to crises involving external shocks and external trade deficits - and why. Trying to defend an overvalued exchange rate with protectionist trade policies is a classic pattern, but experience shows such protection does significantly retard the country's growth, and delay its integration into the world trading community. In fact, and overvalued exchange rate is often the root cause of protection, preventing the country from returning to more liberal trade policies that allow growth and integration into the world community without exchange rate adjustment. Most developing countries have downward price and wage rigidities and, with an external trade deficit, require some form of nominal exchange rate adjustment to restore external equilibrium. The authors present cross-country econometric and case study evidence - citing examples from Argentina, Chile, Ghana, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Turkey, Uruguay, and Sub-Saharan Africa (including the CFA zone) - that overvalued exchange rates reduce economic growth. Defending the exchange rate, they show, has nor no medium-term benefits, since falling reserves will eventually force devaluation. Better to have devaluation occur without further debilitating losses in reserves and lost productivity because of import controls. After devaluation the exchange rate will reach a new equilibrium, strongly influenced by government and central bank policies.
  • Publication
    Public Debt Management and Macroeconomic Stability : An Overview
    (Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-09-01) Montiel, Peter J.
    Recent research suggests that management of the public sector debt can have important effects on a country macroeconomic performance. This Public debt management and macroeconomic stability article provides an overview of the factors that the recent literature has identified as important in determining the optimal composition of the public debt. Based on this analysis, it attempts to establish general guidelines for public debt management in emerging economies. To retain market access and promote domestic financial market development, governments should generally finance themselves at market rates using a wide variety of securities. Beyond this general principle, the optimal composition of the public debt involves a tradeoff between enhancing the government anti-inflationary credibility and reducing the vulnerability of its budget to macroeconomic shocks. Consequently, the optimal composition of the debt depends on a country circumstances. Debt should be heavily weighted toward long-term nominal securities for governments that have anti-inflationary credibility and toward long-term indexed debt for those that do not.
  • Publication
    Is There Room for Foreign Exchange Interventions Under an Inflation Targeting Framework? Evidence from Mexico and Turkey
    (World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-04) Domaç, Ilker; Mendoza, Alfonso
    The salient characteristics of emerging market economies coupled with the increasing adoption of inflation targeting in these countries has stimulated much debate about the role of the exchange rate in inflation targeting regimes. The authors aim at shedding more light on this issue by investigating whether central bank foreign exchange interventions have had any impact on the volatility of the exchange rate in Mexico and Turkey since the adoption of the floating regime. To this end, their study, using daily data on foreign exchange intervention, employs an Exponential GARCH framework. Empirical results suggest that both the amount and frequency of foreign exchange interventions have decreased the volatility of the exchange rates in these countries. The authors' findings corroborate the notion that if foreign exchange interventions are carried out with finesse and sensibly-that is, not to defend a particular exchange rate-they could play a useful role in containing the adverse effects of temporary exchange rate shocks on inflation and financial stability.
  • Publication
    Explaining and Forecasting Inflation in Turkey
    (World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-04) Domaç, Ilker
    The growing adoption of an inflation targeting framework in emerging market economies has increased the importance of understanding inflation dynamics and forecasting its future path in these countries. The author considers the case of Turkey and investigates the performance of models that have some theoretical foundations. To this end, his study focuses on mark-up models, monetary models, and the Phillips curve. The findings suggest that the mark-up models have the best in-sample performance followed by money gap models and the Phillips curve. The empirical results from out-of-sample forecasting performance for the period covering the new economic program (May 2001-December 2002), however, show that the Phillips curve and the money gap models perform better than mark-up models. These findings, in turn, imply that (1) Phillips curves augmented with the exchange rate and money models might provide complementary views in the Turkish context; and (2) the relative importance of output gap and monetary disequilibrium in the inflation process has increased under the floating exchange rate regime. The results underscore the importance of relying on multiple models of inflation in the conduct of Turkish monetary policy.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    Digital Progress and Trends Report 2023
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-05) World Bank
    Digitalization is the transformational opportunity of our time. The digital sector has become a powerhouse of innovation, economic growth, and job creation. Value added in the IT services sector grew at 8 percent annually during 2000–22, nearly twice as fast as the global economy. Employment growth in IT services reached 7 percent annually, six times higher than total employment growth. The diffusion and adoption of digital technologies are just as critical as their invention. Digital uptake has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic, with 1.5 billion new internet users added from 2018 to 2022. The share of firms investing in digital solutions around the world has more than doubled from 2020 to 2022. Low-income countries, vulnerable populations, and small firms, however, have been falling behind, while transformative digital innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI) have been accelerating in higher-income countries. Although more than 90 percent of the population in high-income countries was online in 2022, only one in four people in low-income countries used the internet, and the speed of their connection was typically only a small fraction of that in wealthier countries. As businesses in technologically advanced countries integrate generative AI into their products and services, less than half of the businesses in many low- and middle-income countries have an internet connection. The growing digital divide is exacerbating the poverty and productivity gaps between richer and poorer economies. The Digital Progress and Trends Report series will track global digitalization progress and highlight policy trends, debates, and implications for low- and middle-income countries. The series adds to the global efforts to study the progress and trends of digitalization in two main ways: · By compiling, curating, and analyzing data from diverse sources to present a comprehensive picture of digitalization in low- and middle-income countries, including in-depth analyses on understudied topics. · By developing insights on policy opportunities, challenges, and debates and reflecting the perspectives of various stakeholders and the World Bank’s operational experiences. This report, the first in the series, aims to inform evidence-based policy making and motivate action among internal and external audiences and stakeholders. The report will bring global attention to high-performing countries that have valuable experience to share as well as to areas where efforts will need to be redoubled.
  • Publication
    Empowerment in Practice : From Analysis to Implementation
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006) Alsop, Ruth; Bertelsen, Mette; Holland, Jeremy
    This book represents an effort to present an easily accessible framework to readers, especially those for whom empowerment remains a puzzling development concern, conceptually and in application. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 explains how the empowerment framework can be used for understanding, measuring, monitoring, and operationalizing empowerment policy and practice. Part 2 presents summaries of each of the five country studies, using them to discuss how the empowerment framework can be applied in very different country and sector contexts and what lessons can be learned from these test cases. While this book can offer only a limited empirical basis for the positive association between empowerment and development outcomes, it does add to the body of work supporting the existence of such a relationship. Perhaps more importantly, it also provides a framework for future research to test the association and to prioritize practical interventions seeking to empower individuals and groups.
  • Publication
    Global Economic Prospects, January 2025
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16) World Bank
    Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.
  • Publication
    The Container Port Performance Index 2023
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-18) World Bank
    The Container Port Performance Index (CPPI) measures the time container ships spend in port, making it an important point of reference for stakeholders in the global economy. These stakeholders include port authorities and operators, national governments, supranational organizations, development agencies, and other public and private players in trade and logistics. The index highlights where vessel time in container ports could be improved. Streamlining these processes would benefit all parties involved, including shipping lines, national governments, and consumers. This fourth edition of the CPPI relies on data from 405 container ports with at least 24 container ship port calls in the calendar year 2023. As in earlier editions of the CPPI, the ranking employs two different methodological approaches: an administrative (technical) approach and a statistical approach (using matrix factorization). Combining these two approaches ensures that the overall ranking of container ports reflects actual port performance as closely as possible while also being statistically robust. The CPPI methodology assesses the sequential steps of a container ship port call. ‘Total port hours’ refers to the total time elapsed from the moment a ship arrives at the port until the vessel leaves the berth after completing its cargo operations. The CPPI uses time as an indicator because time is very important to shipping lines, ports, and the entire logistics chain. However, time, as captured by the CPPI, is not the only way to measure port efficiency, so it does not tell the entire story of a port’s performance. Factors that can influence the time vessels spend in ports can be location-specific and under the port’s control (endogenous) or external and beyond the control of the port (exogenous). The CPPI measures time spent in container ports, strictly based on quantitative data only, which do not reveal the underlying factors or root causes of extended port times. A detailed port-specific diagnostic would be required to assess the contribution of underlying factors to the time a vessel spends in port. A very low ranking or a significant change in ranking may warrant special attention, for which the World Bank generally recommends a detailed diagnostic.
  • Publication
    Global Economic Prospects, June 2025
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-10) World Bank
    The global economy is facing another substantial headwind, emanating largely from an increase in trade tensions and heightened global policy uncertainty. For emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs), the ability to boost job creation and reduce extreme poverty has declined. Key downside risks include a further escalation of trade barriers and continued policy uncertainty. These challenges are exacerbated by subdued foreign direct investment into EMDEs. Global cooperation is needed to restore a more stable international trade environment and scale up support for vulnerable countries grappling with conflict, debt burdens, and climate change. Domestic policy action is also critical to contain inflation risks and strengthen fiscal resilience. To accelerate job creation and long-term growth, structural reforms must focus on raising institutional quality, attracting private investment, and strengthening human capital and labor markets. Countries in fragile and conflict situations face daunting development challenges that will require tailored domestic policy reforms and well-coordinated multilateral support.