Norman Miller provides a fresh perspective on balance of payments and exchange rate theories, including intertemporal open economy models that focus on the optimum current account. To this end, he proves that any non-zero balance of payments must always be associated with a disequilibrium in either a commodity or an asset market. In this rigorous yet readable book, important welfare and policy implications are carefully examined. Norman Miller develops a new theory of the balance of payments associated with commodity market disequilibrium, a loanable funds theory of exchange rate and a modern foreign exchange market theory of the exchange rate that incorporates capital flows. The book also details 15 puzzling facts associated with open economies and the FX market. After reviewing existing explanations to these puzzles, the author shows how each of the above new theories provides new, often unified solutions to them. International finance practitioners, students and scholars of economics and finance, and MBA students will all find this book fresh and enlightening.

An original and systematic synthesis of the major postwar developments in theory and policy of balance-of-payments adjustment, this book focuses on the present-day system of pegged-but-adjustable exchange rates and the problems that policy authorities must face if they are to attain full employment, price stability, balance-of-payments equilibrium, and a satisfactory rate of economic growth. The dominate theme of this book is that any system of exchange rates carries with it assumptions about the way it works and how effective the automatic and policy-motivated forces operate to bring about equilibrium in a country's balance of payments. By analyzing balance-of-payments adjustment and policies under alternative exchange-rate systems, and with different assumptions concerning the level of employment and prices, it is possible to embrace a wide variety of contemporary and historical circumstances experienced by individual countries and the world as a whole. In this way the author assesses the economic consequences of the different exchange-rate systems and of the policies that countries may follow to attain their national objectives. In particular it appears to Professor Stern that the international monetary turmoil of the past ten years can be traced to the exchange-rate inflexibilities of the adjustable-peg system and to the creation of excessive reserves under the dollar standard. He demonstrates that the international monetary system must be redesigned to permit greater exchange-rate inflexibility and control over the creation of new international reserve assets.

''In summary, the book is valuable as a textbook both at the advanced undergraduate level and at the graduate level. It is also very useful for the economist who wants to be brought up-to-date on theoretical and empirical research on exchange rate behaviour.'' ""Journal of International Economics""

This book collects together the basic documents of an approach to the theory and policy of the balance of payments developed in the 1970s. The approach marked a return to the historical traditions of international monetary theory after some thirty years of departure from them – a departure occasioned by the international collapse of the 1930s, the Keynesian Revolution and a long period of war and post-war reconstruction in which the international monetary system was fragmented by exchange controls, currency inconvertibility and controls over international trade and capital movements.

This volume grew out of a National Bureau of Economic Research conference on exchange rates held in Bellagio, Italy, in 1982. In it, the world's most respected international monetary economists discuss three significant new views on the economics of exchange rates - Rudiger Dornbusch's overshooting model, Jacob Frenkel's and Michael Mussa's asset market variants, and Pentti Kouri's current account/portfolio approach. Their papers test these views with evidence from empirical studies and analyze a number of exchange rate policies in use today, including those of the European Monetary System.

Norman Miller provides a fresh perspective on balance of payments and exchange rate theories, including intertemporal open economy models that focus on the optimum current account. To this end, he proves that any non-zero balance of payments must always be associated with a disequilibrium in either a commodity or an asset market. In this rigorous yet readable book, important welfare and policy implications are carefully examined. Norman Miller develops a new theory of the balance of payments associated with commodity market disequilibrium, a loanable funds theory of exchange rate and a modern foreign exchange market theory of the exchange rate that incorporates capital flows.