One widely shared conclusion from this episode is that adjustable or crawling pegs are extremely fragile in a world of volatile capital movements. The pressure resulting from massive capital flow reversals and weakened domestic financial systems was too strong even for countries that followed sound macroeconomic policies and had large stocks of reserves. This paper argues that, while currency boards or even dollarization may be justified in some extreme cases, they are not appropriate for all developing countries. The recommendations formulated on the basis of the Mundell-McKinnon criteria for the optimum currency are considered still sensible today.
Currency boards face serious implementation problems.
Floating appears to have wider applicability. As Friedman already argued in the early 1950s, if prices move slowly, it is both faster and less costly to move the nominal exchange rate in response to a shock that requires an adjustment in the real exchange rate. But for exchange-rate flexibility to be stabilizing, it has to be implemented by independent central banks whose commitment to low inflation is credible. But floating also faces questions of implementation. The paper elaborates on a number of points in this regard on which recent experience is likely to be instructive, but on which more research is needed.