Exchange Rate Regimes And Economic Performance: A Comparative Analysis

ABSTRACT In 1973 the industrial countries of the world abandoned the Bretton - Wood adjustable - peg exchange rate system as a means of international payments, and embraced a floating exchange rate system. By the beginning of the 1980's some developing countries of the world joined the league of exchange rate-floaters. It was thought that a floating exchange rate system is intrinsically superior to a fixed one because it not only insulates an economy from the events in other economies but also provides automatic adjustment of the trade balance and the balance of payments. From the mid 1980's however there have been calls in the industrial countries for yet a change in the international payments system from a floating one back to the BrettonWoods fixed system (Marris, 1984; Dunn, 1983) or to some other variant of a fixed system. The questions then are - is there an ideal exchange rate regime? - is there reason to believe that a given exchange rate regime enhances the performance of an economy better than another? These questions form the focus of this study. There have been several positions in the literature. While Mundell-Fleming (1960, 1962) maintain that a floating exchange system is better than a fixed one if a country tends to depend more on monetary policy, but that a fixed exchange rate regime is ideal when fiscal policy is the major instrument employed in an economy, Sohmen (1965) maintained that a floating regime is superior whatever the more dominant economic policy (fiscal or monetary). Demberg (1970) maintained that the performance of an economy does not depend on the exchange rate regime per-se but rather on the optimal mix of fiscal and monetary policy. In the developing world there is fear that a floating exchange regime would aggravate rather than reduce the problems of inflation. debt-service burden and balance of payments disequilibrium (Olofin, Akinkugbe, Ajayi 1986). This study therefore attempted to find out which of the positions in the literature really holds in the case of developing African economies. To find answers to the issues raised we chose three african economies who had experienced both fixed and floating exchange rate systems. namely. Ghana. Nigeria and Uganda. We built a model of each economy in the manner of Rhomberg (1964) and Tullio 1981. Each model has two versions. The shorter version has seven stochastic equa tions and tries to capture the economy under a fixed system. while the longer version added two additional stochastic equations to the first set and endogenizes exchange rates and interest rates as obtains under a floating exchange system. Utilizing quarterly data for 1977 to 1990 for Nigeria and Ghana. and for 1981 to 1990 for Uganda and employing the Ordinary Least Squares technique we estimated the shorter version of the model for the period 1977:1- 1990:4 and the longer version for the period 1986:4-1990:4 for Ghana and Nigeria. In the case of Uganda we estimated the longer version for the period 1981:1 to 1990:4 and the shorter version for 1987:2 to 1990:4.