文档介绍：“The Influence of the RMB on Exchange Rate Policy in Other Economies”
Takatoshi Ito
University of Tokyo
October 19, 2007
Washington DC
Prepared for Peterson Institute for International Economics Conference
China’s Exchange Rate Policy
1. Introduction
The East Asian countries, most notably China, are often collectively described as a
region that manages, if not manipulates, the exchange rate toward undervaluation,
achieves large current account surpluses, and accumulates foreign reserves. Indeed the
East Asian region, as well as oil producing nations, is on the surplus side in the
accounting of global imbalances. However, unlike the first impression, the exchange
rate regimes of East Asian countries are diverse and uncoordinated. A lack of
coordination prevents, rather than help, global exchange rate adjustment that is essential
to resolve global Countries that trade with China pete with China
in exports to the third market are keen not to allow too much appreciation of own
currencies vis-à-vis the Chinese RMB. When China is allowing its currency to
appreciate only very gradually, the neighboring countries will not allow sharp
appreciation of their own currencies.
1 See Blanchard, Giavazzi, and Sa (2005) and Obstfeld and Rogoff (2005) for standard
references for global imbalances and the necessity of exchange rate adjustment.
1
Currently, countries under the managed exchange rate regime, such as Korea, Singapore,
and Thailand, tend to keep the trade-weighted exchange rate stable—rather than the
dollar peg. As the weights of China in exports and imports have increased in these
countries, the influence of Chinese exchange rate policy on these currencies is
considered to have increased. The trend is fairly certain, but the variations are diverse.
In the past several years, appreciations of the Korean won and the Thai baht are much
more pronounced than very gradual appreciation of the Ch