In January of this year, Jamil Mahuad, then president of Ecuador, startled his compatriots by proposing to eliminate the national currency, the sucre. Instead, Mahuad advanced, the U.S. dollar would replace the sucre for all purposes. Although a popular uprising forced him out of office a week later, the succeeding government has actually implemented his proposal and recently announced that U.S. dollars will have completely replaced the sucre by September 2000. ; The question remains as to whether the Ecuadorian plan will be successful and, more generally, whether other countries will follow Ecuador's lead. But one thing is clear: proposals to replace the domestic currency with the U.S. dollar, or to "dollarize" the economy, have taken center stage in Latin America and other developing regions. To illustrate why dollarization has risen from neglect to such a central role, this article discusses the currently fashionable proposals for dollarization in Latin America and other developing regions. ; The article places special emphasis on identifying and analyzing various arguments for and against dollarization in the light of existing economic theory and evidence. The author compares the relative significance of the costs and benefits. Observing that measurement problems are significant, he concludes that, remarkably, the popular belief that dollarization is a desirable reform has been reached in spite of widespread uncertainty about its economic benefits.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Article provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in its journal Economic Review.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Atish R. Ghosh & Anne-Marie Gulde & Jonathan D. Ostry & Holger C. Wolf, 1997.
"Does The Nominal Exchange Rate Regime Matter?,"
Working Papers
97-09, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics.
Other versions:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)