Abstract |
Dollarization,in a broad sense, is increasingly a defining characteristic of manyemerging market economies. How important is this trend quantitativelyand how important is it for the conduct of monetary policy and thechoice of exchange rate regimes? Though these questions have become ahot topic in both the theory and policy literature, most efforts areremarkably uninformed by evidence, in no small part because meaningfuldata has been lacking, except for a very narrow range of assets. Thispaper attempts to move the discussion forward and shed light on thecritical questions by proposing a measure of dollarization that isbroad both conceptually and in terms of country coverage. We use thismeasure to identify trends in the evolution of dollarization in thedeveloping world in the last two decades, and to ascertain theconsequences that dollarization has had on the effectiveness ofmonetary and exchange rate policy. We find that, contrary to thegeneral presumption in the literature, a high degree of dollarizationdoes not seem to be an obstacle to monetary control or to disinflation.A level of dollarization does, however, appear to increase exchangerate pass-through, reinforcing the claim that fear of floating' is agreater problem for highly dollarized economies. We also review thedeveloping countries' record in combating their addiction to dollars.Concretely, we try to explain why some countries have been able toavoid certain forms of the addiction, and examine the evidence onsuccessful de-dollarization.