IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/122652.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A fistful of Dinars: demystifying Iraq’s dollar auction

Author

Listed:
  • Tabaqchali, Ahmed

Abstract

The Central Bank of Iraq’s (CBI) dollar auction has been a continuous source of controversies and conspiracy theories. The main accusations facing it include: the siphoning of dollars to Iran, money laundering, and currency smuggling. Missing from this melee is an understanding of the economy’s key structural imbalances: mainly that the Iraqi economy is wholly dependent on oil export revenues, and demand for goods and services is met through imports handled by a largely informal private sector. Consequently, the government’s oil revenues are the economy’s major source of dollars, and the private sector depends on the auction as a significant source of dollars to pay for these imports. As such, it is the inherent imbalances in the economy’s structure that led to contradictory and unsustainable compromises within the functioning of the auction, and not unsubstantiated conspiracies. This piece aims to demystify the role and the functioning of the auction. It does so through reviewing (1) the oil and dollar lifecycle within Iraqi economy, (2) the private sector’s dollar supply-demand dynamics, and (3) the causes of the currency’s upheavals in November 2022, and their aftermath. It concludes that the measures undertaken in response to the upheavals have helped resolve most of the compromises that bedevilled the dollar auction in the past. However, lasting change requires addressing the economy’s structural imbalances head-on through implementing fundamental economic reforms centred around redefining the oversized role of the government in the economy and society.

Suggested Citation

  • Tabaqchali, Ahmed, 2024. "A fistful of Dinars: demystifying Iraq’s dollar auction," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 122652, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
  • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:122652
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/122652/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H00 - Public Economics - - General - - - General
    • D44 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Auctions

    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:ehl:lserod:122652. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.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.