No Single Currency Regime Is Right for All Countries or at All Times Jeffrey A. Frankel Essays in International Finance No. 215 August 1999, ISBN 0-88165-122-2 (34 pages; 1 table; 4 figures)

This essay considers some currently popular prescriptions for exchange-rate regimes: a general movement toward floating, toward fixing, or toward either extreme and away from the middle. The whole spectrum from fixed to floating is covered (including basket pegs, crawling pegs, and bands), with special attention to currency boards and dollarization. One overall theme is that the appropriate exchange-rate regime varies depending on the specific circumstances of the country in question (which includes the classic optimum-currency-area (OCA) criteria, as well as some newer criteria related to credibility) and depending on the circumstances of the period in question (which includes the problem of successful exit strategies). Latin American interest rates are seen to be more sensitive to U.S. interest rates when the country in question has a loose dollar peg than when it has a tight peg. It is also argued that such relevant country characteristics as income correlations and openness can vary over time, and that the OCA criterion is accordingly endogenous.