Short Communication on the Tunisian Exchange Regime a Decade after the Revolution

Abstract

Over the decade following the revolution, the IMF annual reports on exchange arrangements and exchange restrictions show that the Tunisian de facto exchange regime is not compliant with the de jure regime announced by the Tunisian authority. The latter claims a floating regime, except in 2013-2015, whereas the International Monetary Fund (IMF) states that it is a rather crawl-like regime, except in 2017. This discrepancy between the real and the official exchange regime is neither new nor specific to Tunisia. The IMF was aware of it and it has adopted a de facto classification since 1999. Nevertheless, this dichotomy is a bit surprising for Tunisia for the next reason: Tunisia has experienced a revolution that ended in early 2011 a dictatorship regime and established a democratic political regime supposed to be more accountable and more transparent. This controversy raises an important question: The exchange regime dichotomy stated by the IMF, does it really exist despite the transition toward democracy, or it is only an allegation that can be attributed to the inaccurate verification technique used by the IMF? In this context, the Tunisian de facto exchange regime over the postrevolution decade. The paper can be reduced to two main parts. The first part summarizes the theoretical explanations of the divergence between the de facto exchange regime and the de jure exchange regime. The second part consists of empirical verification of the Tunisian exchange regime by using descriptive statistics and econometric models.