Analyzes the costs and benefits of full dollarization, or the adoption by one country of another country’s currency. Potential advantages include lower borrowing costs and deeper integration into world markets. But countries lose the ability to devalue, and become dependent on the U.S. Compares with currency board option.

"Andrew Berg was miner, hunter, trapper, fisherman, warden, and Alaska's first licensed hunting guide. More than a biography, this is a well-documented history of the early American settlement of the Kenai Peninsula."

The integration of financial markets around the world over the past decade has posed new challenges for policymakers. The speed with which money can be switched in and out of currencies and countries has increased with the efficiency of global communications, considerably shortening the time policymakers have to respond to emerging crises. This pamphlet takes alook at attempts by economists to predict crises by developing early warning systems to signal when trouble may be brewing in currency markets and banking systems.

This note raises the IMF’s profile on a number of issues related to inequality, unemployment, governance, etc. It builds on earlier empirical work that examined correlations between growth downbreaks/duration of growth spells and a range of macro/policy/institutional factors. This paper is designed to be more accessible, more policy oriented, and focused squarely on the issue of inequality and the sustainability of growth. It will reference the literature that has gained prominence in the wake of the global crisis, and the possible links between the crisis and rising inequality in countries at the epicenter of the crisis. The analytical findings will also be connected to real world policy narratives in certain countries, to provide texture to the results and enhance policy relevance. The paper will argue that, based on the empirical findings, more equality in the income distribution is associated with longer-lived growth spells. Broad redistributive policies are not necessarily pro-growth, however, as these can have strong disincentive effects. The paper’s policy discussion is appropriately cautious, therefore, offering only tentative ideas, for example, active labor market policies and more attention to human capital investments designed to avoid conflicts between efficiency and equity perspectives.

The Fund has recognized in recent years that one cannot separate issues of economic growth and stability on one hand and equality on the other. Indeed, there is a strong case for considering inequality and an inability to sustain economic growth as two sides of the same coin. Central to the Fund’s mandate is providing advice that will enable members’ economies to grow on a sustained basis. But the Fund has rightly been cautious about recommending the use of redistributive policies given that such policies may themselves undercut economic efficiency and the prospects for sustained growth (the so-called “leaky bucket” hypothesis written about by the famous Yale economist Arthur Okun in the 1970s). This SDN follows up the previous SDN on inequality and growth by focusing on the role of redistribution. It finds that, from the perspective of the best available macroeconomic data, there is not a lot of evidence that redistribution has in fact undercut economic growth (except in extreme cases). One should be careful not to assume therefore—as Okun and others have—that there is a big tradeoff between redistribution and growth. The best available macroeconomic data do not support such a conclusion.

We develop a model to analyze the macroeconomic effects of a scaling-up of aid and assess the implications of different policy responses. The model features key structural characteristics of low-income countries, including varying degrees of public investment efficiency and a learning-by-doing (LBD) externality that captures Dutch disease effects. On the policy front, it distinguishes between spending the aid, which is controlled by the fiscal authority, and absorbing the aid - financing a higher current account deficit - which is influenced by the central bank's reserve accumulation policies. We calibrate the model to Uganda and run several experiments. We find that a policy mix that results in full spending and absorption of aid can generate temporary demand and real exchange rate appreciation pressures, but also have a positive effect on real GDP in the medium term, through higher public capital. Full spending with partial absorption, on the other hand, may stem appreciation pressures but can also induce adverse medium-term real GDP effects, through private sector crowding out. When aid is very inefficiently invested and there are strong LBD externalities, aid can be harmful, and partial absorption policies may be justified. But in this case, a welfare improving solution is to defer spending or - even better if possible - raise its efficiency.

This paper evaluates three models for predicting currency crises that were proposed before 1997. The idea is to answer the question: if we had been using these models in late 1996, how well armed would we have been to predict the Asian crisis? The results are mixed but somewhat encouraging. One model, and our modifications to it, provide useful forecasts, at least compared with a naive benchmark. The head-to-head comparison also sheds light on the economics of currency crises, the nature of the Asian crisis, and issues in the empirical modeling of currency crises.

We may be on the cusp of a “second industrial revolution” based on advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. We analyze the implications for inequality and output, using a model with two assumptions: “robot” capital is distinct from traditional capital in its degree of substitutability with human labor; and only capitalists and skilled workers save. We analyze a range of variants that reflect widely different views of how automation may transform the labor market. Our main results are surprisingly robust: automation is good for growth and bad for equality; in the benchmark model real wages fall in the short run and eventually rise, but “eventually” can easily take generations.

There is good reason and much evidence to suggest that the real exchange rate matters for economic growth, but why? The "Washington Consensus" (WC) view holds that real exchange rate misalignment implies macroeconomic imbalances that are themselves bad for growth. In contrast, Rodrik (2008) argues that undervaluation relative to purchasing power parity is good for growth because it promotes the otherwise inefficiently small tradable sector. Our main result is that WC and the Rodrik views of the role of misalignment in growth are observationally equivalent for the main growth regressions he reports. There is an identification problem: Determinants of misalignment are also likely to be independent drivers of growth, and these types of growth regressions are hard-pressed to disentangle the different channels. However, we confirm that not only are overvaluations bad but undervaluations are also good for growth, a result squarely consistent with the Rodrik story but one that requires some gymnastics from the WC viewpoint.

There is an old joke that says that the exam questions in economics remain the same every year-only the answers change. Certainly, the debate about the best exchange rate regime has been with us forever, but new answers keep appearing. The newest answer to the question of what exchange rate regime countries should choose is none. That is, countries should forgo using their own currency entirely and adopt as legal tender a stable foreign currency, most commonly the U.S. dollar. Then-president Carlos Menem of Argentina suggested last year that Argentina should adopt the U.S. dollar-that is, dollarize-as the ultimate solution to its long history of difficulties with monetary and exchange rate policy. More recently, Ecuador has announced its intention to adopt the dollar, in the context of a deep economic and political crisis. Prominent economists have begun to argue that essentially all developing countries should also dollarize (see Calvo and Reinhart, 1999). Not only developing countries, however, are considering dollarization. Partly prompted by the example of the adoption of the euro this year, some have suggested that Canada should adopt the U.S. dollar as well.