Exchange rate regime choice has evolved considerably in the past 100 years. At the beginning of the twentieth century the choice was obvious - - join the gold standard, all the advanced countries have done it. Floating exchange rates and fiat money are only for profligate countries. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the choice is also becoming more obvious - - go to floating exchange rates, all the advanced countries have done it. Moreover in both eras, the emerging markets of the day tried to emulate the advanced countries but in many cases had great difficulties in doing so. What happened in the past century to lead to this tour de force? In this paper I survey the issue of exchange rate regime choice from the perspective of both the advanced countries and the emergers taking an historical perspective. I first survey the theoretical issues beginning with a taxonomy of regimes. I then examine the empirical evidence on the delineation of regimes and their macro performance. The penultimate section provides a brief history of monetary regimes in advanced and emerging countries. The conclusion considers the case for managed float for today's emergers.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
9654.
Length: Date of creation: Apr 2003 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9654
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Find related papers by JEL classification: N20 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - General, International, or Comparative F33 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - International Monetary Arrangements and Institutions
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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.:
Reinhart, Carmen & Calvo, Guillermo, 2002.
"Fear of floating,"
MPRA Paper
14000, University Library of Munich, Germany.
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Guillermo A. Calvo & Carmen M. Reinhart, 2000.
"Fear of Floating,"
NBER Working Papers
7993, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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