IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iee/wpaper/wp0084.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Central Banks’ Dilemma: Reserve Accumulation, Inflation and Financial Instability

Author

Abstract

Central banks’ international reserves have increased significantly in the recent past. While this accumulation has been widely perceived as precautionary savings to prevent financial crises, rising reserves might also endanger monetary and financial stability. This paper sheds new light on the implications for financial stability and assesses the consequences for monetary policy on theoretical and empirical grounds. Our estimation results show that the accumulation of reserves raises the inflation rate, both on the global and the individual-country level.

Suggested Citation

  • Andreas Steiner, 2010. "Central Banks’ Dilemma: Reserve Accumulation, Inflation and Financial Instability," IEER Working Papers 84, Institute of Empirical Economic Research, Osnabrueck University.
    • Handle: RePEc:iee:wpaper:wp0084
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://web.fb9.uni-osnabrueck.de/repec/iee/wpaper/12906268_WP_84.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Eichengreen, Barry & Rose, Andrew K & Wyplosz, Charles, 1996. "Contagious Currency Crises," CEPR Discussion Papers 1453, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Joshua Aizenman & Daniel Riera-Crichton, 2008. "Real Exchange Rate and International Reserves in an Era of Growing Financial and Trade Integration," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 90(4), pages 812-815, November.
    3. Robert J. Barro, 1998. "Determinants of Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Empirical Study," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262522543, April.
    4. Dani Rodrik, 2006. "The social cost of foreign exchange reserves," International Economic Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(3), pages 253-266.
    5. Rose, Andrew K. & Spiegel, Mark M., 2011. "Cross-country causes and consequences of the crisis: An update," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 55(3), pages 309-324, April.
    6. Atish Ghosh & Steven Phillips, 1998. "Warning: Inflation May Be Harmful to Your Growth," IMF Staff Papers, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 45(4), pages 672-710, December.
    7. Andrew K. Rose & Mark M. Spiegel, "undated". "Cross-Country Causes and Consequences of the 2008 Crisis: Early Warning," Working Papers 6, Department of the Treasury, Ministry of the Economy and of Finance.
    8. Rüffer, Rasmus & Stracca, Livio, 2006. "What is global excess liquidity, and does it matter?," Working Paper Series 696, European Central Bank.
    9. Joshua Aizenman & Jaewoo Lee, 2007. "International Reserves: Precautionary Versus Mercantilist Views, Theory and Evidence," Open Economies Review, Springer, vol. 18(2), pages 191-214, April.
    10. Niehans, Jurg, 1976. "How to Fill an Empty Shell," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 66(2), pages 177-183, May.
    11. Matteo Ciccarelli & Benoît Mojon, 2010. "Global Inflation," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(3), pages 524-535, August.
    12. Fratzscher, Marcel, 2009. "What explains global exchange rate movements during the financial crisis?," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 28(8), pages 1390-1407, December.
    13. Alice Ouyang & Ramkishen Rajan & Tom Willett, 2008. "Managing the Monetary Consequences of Reserve Accumulation in Emerging Asia," Global Economic Review, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 37(2), pages 171-199.
    14. Guillermo A. Calvo, 1991. "The Perils of Sterilization," IMF Staff Papers, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 38(4), pages 921-926, December.
    15. Edwards, Sebastian, 1984. "The Demand for International Reserves and Monetary Equilibrium: Some Evidence from Developing Countries," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 66(3), pages 495-500, August.
    16. Maurice Obstfeld & Jay C. Shambaugh & Alan M. Taylor, 2010. "Financial Stability, the Trilemma, and International Reserves," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 2(2), pages 57-94, April.
    17. World Bank, 2008. "World Development Indicators 2008," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 11855.
    18. Maurice Obstfeld & Jay C. Shambaugh & Alan M. Taylor, 2009. "Financial Instability, Reserves, and Central Bank Swap Lines in the Panic of 2008," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(2), pages 480-486, May.
    19. Ouyang, Alice Y. & Rajan, Ramkishen S. & Willett, Thomas D., 2010. "China as a reserve sink: The evidence from offset and sterilization coefficients," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 29(5), pages 951-972, September.
    20. Joshua Aizenman & Reuven Glick, 2009. "Sterilization, Monetary Policy, and Global Financial Integration," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 17(4), pages 777-801, September.
    21. Christopher J. Neely & David E. Rapach, 2008. "Is inflation an international phenomenon?," Working Papers 2008-025, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    22. Paul De Grauwe & Magdalena Polan, 2005. "Is Inflation Always and Everywhere a Monetary Phenomenon?," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 107(2), pages 239-259, June.
    23. Aghion, Philippe & Bacchetta, Philippe & Banerjee, Abhijit, 2004. "Financial development and the instability of open economies," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(6), pages 1077-1106, September.
    24. Carmen M. Reinhart & Vincent R. Reinhart, 2008. "Capital Inflows and Reserve Accumulation: The Recent Evidence," NBER Working Papers 13842, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    25. Shu Lin, 2010. "On the International Effects of Inflation Targeting," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(1), pages 195-199, February.
    26. Robert Lavigne, 2008. "Sterilized Intervention in Emerging-Market Economies: Trends, Costs, and Risks," Discussion Papers 08-4, Bank of Canada.
    27. World Bank, 2008. "World Development Indicators 2008," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 28241.
    28. Jeffrey A. Frankel & George Saravelos, 2010. "Are Leading Indicators of Financial Crises Useful for Assessing Country Vulnerability? Evidence from the 2008-09 Global Crisis," NBER Working Papers 16047, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ayesh Ariyasinghe & N. S. Cooray, 2021. "The Nexus Of Foreign Reserves, Exchange Rate And Inflation: Recent Empirical Evidence From Sri Lanka," South Asia Economic Journal, Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka, vol. 22(1), pages 29-72, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Frankel, Jeffrey, 2010. "Monetary Policy in Emerging Markets," Handbook of Monetary Economics, in: Benjamin M. Friedman & Michael Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Monetary Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 25, pages 1439-1520, Elsevier.
    2. Dongwon Lee, 2023. "International cooperation in foreign reserve policies in the presence of competitive hoarding," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(2), pages 389-412, May.
    3. Steiner, Andreas, 2013. "How central banks prepare for financial crises – An empirical analysis of the effects of crises and globalisation on international reserves," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 208-234.
    4. Bruce N. Lehmann & David M. Modest, 1985. "The Empirical Foundations of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory I: The Empirical Tests," NBER Working Papers 1725, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Carmen M. Reinhart & Takeshi Tashiro, 2013. "Crowding out redefined: the role of reserve accumulation," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issue Nov, pages 1-43.
    6. Qian, Xingwang & Steiner, Andreas, 2017. "International reserves and the maturity of external debt," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 73(PB), pages 399-418.
    7. Yun, Youngjin, 2020. "Reserve accumulation and bank lending: Evidence from Korea," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 105(C).
    8. Catão, Luis A.V. & Milesi-Ferretti, Gian Maria, 2014. "External liabilities and crises," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(1), pages 18-32.
    9. Chiţu, Livia, 2012. "Was unofficial dollarisation/euroisation an amplifier of the 'Great Recession' of 2007-09 in emerging economies," Working Paper Series 1473, European Central Bank.
    10. Prakash Kumar Shrestha, Ph.D., 2016. "Macroeconomic Impact of International Reserves: Empirical Evidence from South Asia," NRB Working Paper 32/2016, Nepal Rastra Bank, Research Department.
    11. Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas & Maurice Obstfeld, 2012. "Stories of the Twentieth Century for the Twenty-First," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 4(1), pages 226-265, January.
    12. Livia Chitu, 2013. "Was Unofficial Dollarisation/Euroisation an Amplifier of the ‘Great Recession’ of 2007–2009 in Emerging Economies?," Comparative Economic Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Association for Comparative Economic Studies, vol. 55(2), pages 233-265, June.
    13. Prakash Kumar Shrestha, Ph.D., 2016. "Macroeconomic Impact of International Reserves: Empirical Evidence from South Asia," NRB Economic Review, Nepal Rastra Bank, Economic Research Department, vol. 28(1), pages 1-26, April.
    14. Dominguez, Kathryn M.E. & Hashimoto, Yuko & Ito, Takatoshi, 2012. "International reserves and the global financial crisis," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(2), pages 388-406.
    15. Steiner, Andreas, 2014. "Reserve accumulation and financial crises: From individual protection to systemic risk," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 126-144.
    16. Aizenman, Joshua, 2019. "A modern reincarnation of Mundell-Fleming's trilemma," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 444-454.
    17. Frankel, Jeffrey & Saravelos, George, 2012. "Can leading indicators assess country vulnerability? Evidence from the 2008–09 global financial crisis," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(2), pages 216-231.
    18. Steiner, Andreas, 2013. "The accumulation of foreign exchange by central banks: Fear of capital mobility?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 38(PB), pages 409-427.
    19. Feldkircher, Martin, 2014. "The determinants of vulnerability to the global financial crisis 2008 to 2009: Credit growth and other sources of risk," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 19-49.
    20. Dominguez, Kathryn M.E., 2012. "Foreign reserve management during the global financial crisis," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(8), pages 2017-2037.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    International Reserves; Inflation; Panel Data Analysis;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies
    • F31 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Exchange
    • C23 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Models with Panel Data; Spatio-temporal Models

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iee:wpaper:wp0084. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Karin Wessler-Rensmann (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ieosnde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.