Policy Pre-Commitment and Institutional Design : A Synthetic Indicator Applied to Currency Boards

Currency boards have been portrayed as an extreme way of creating currency quality and improving monetary policy credibility in emerging market economies. Yet the link between currency board operations and credibility is far from obvious. Indeed, under the heading of currency boards, there is in fact a number of significantly diverse institutional arrangements. Furthermore, currency boards can only be viewed as part of a wider policy framework encompassing fiscal sustainability and flexibility in the real economy. Along these lines, this paper describes as precisely as possible what constitutes, in theory, a currency board. It highlights the specificities of money multiplier and balance sheet issues in currency board frameworks. The paper offers an in-depth review of the actual institutional arrangements underlying existing currency boards in Eastern Europe and Asia (as well as that of Argentina until 2001) and derives a synthetic indicator of institutional pre-commitment. The ...