Ratchet Effects in Currency Substitution: An Application to the Kyrgyz Republic

Currency substitution has been a common issue in the design of monetary policy in most transition economies. This paper analyzes the persistence of this phenomenon in the Kyrgyz Republic up to start of the Russia crisis by including a ratchet variable in the model specification. It concludes that, while some degree of persistence was present in the allocation of bank deposits at that time, currency substitution in the economy at large had not yet reached a point where reversing it would have been costly. Copyright 2000, International Monetary Fund