Too Sensational: On the Choice of Exchange Rate Regimes

Abstract

Too Sensational: On the Choice of Exchange Rate Regimes By W. Max Corden. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 274. $29.95.This volume is the 10th in the series of Ohlin lectures initiated in 1988 at the Stockholm School of Economics. This volume, like the others (the first of which was Bhagwati's 1988 lively Protectionism) is characterized by clear and imaginative thought with no equations. Corden describes his method as story telling informed by theory (p. xiii). The jacket of Bhagwati's book was a cartoon from Punch, which showed the British Prime Minister being led to free trade. My choice for the jacket of this book would have been something like The Economist's November 28, 1968, cover, which showed the heads of Charles DeGaulle, Richard Nixon, and Harold Wilson bobbing among the waves, with the caption It's much better to float. That is the message of the book for most countries: floating is better than a fixed-but-adjustable exchange rate regime, or a FBAR, to use Corden's abbreviation.Instead, the jacket of the book displays the quote from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest that introduced one of the chapters in an early edition of Samuelson's textbook. Cecily, you will read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat sensational. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side. Since my introductory course in economics, I had wondered about what that quote meant. Now 42 years later, I discover that the rupee had been pegged to silver, the pound to gold, and when the price of silver plummeted in the 1870s, the rupee depreciated. Indian goods became more competitive, creating competitiveness problems for British industry, and the home charges, which India had to take to Britain, were denominated in sterling, creating fiscal problems for India. Corden notes that the more recent FBARs have also been too sensational (p. x). This is his way of saying it is important to keep exchange rates in line with fundamentals, or It's much better to float.Corden credits Ohlin with seeing clearly in 1931 the importance of adjusting the Swedish Kroner in order to stabilize the Swedish price level, yet another contribution in addition to his ideas on the factor price equalization theorem and the transfer problem, and his service as leader of Sweden's liberal party for 34 years. Corden quotes Keynes in 1923 as favoring price level stability as more important than exchange rate stability and believing that the most cogent rationale for a gold standard was the rather weak discipline argument, strapping down Ministers of Finance (p. 13).Corden reminds us of core ideas about exchange rate regimes. For example, there is Milton Friedman's point that there is a presumption that currency speculation will be stabilizing, for destabilizing speculation is unprofitable. He laments the jerkyness of FBARs. He suggests that either flexible nominal wages or inflexible real wages creates an overwhelming case for an absolutely fixed (exchange rate) regime. In the former case, exchange rate change is not needed to maintain competitiveness, and in the latter it is not useful. A peg to an individual currency is preferable to pegging to a currency basket in that the former saves transaction costs and is easier to monitor. What follows is a collection of Corden's insights that 1 found particularly interesting.Not many economists living in the real world would dispute that in the short run there is some degree of sluggishness downward of nominal wages in most, if not all, countries (p. 89). And based on overwhelming empirical evidence, Keynesian analysis and policies as presented here are still appropriate for short-to-medium-term situations (p. 90). Also, the Barro-Ricardo complication that forward-looking tax payers will offset fiscal actions is only partial at best, leaving Keynesian demandside prescriptions in tact. …