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.

The exchange rate is a crucial variable linking a nation's domestic economy to the international market. Thus choice of an exchange rate regime is a central component in the economic policy of developing countries and a key factor affecting economic growth. Historically, most developing nations have employed strict exchange rate controls and heavy protection of domestic industry-policies now thought to be at odds with sustainable and desirable rates of economic growth. By contrast, many East Asian nations maintained exchange rate regimes designed to achieve an attractive climate for exports and an "outer-oriented" development strategy. The result has been rapid and consistent economic growth over the past few decades. Changes in Exchange Rates in Rapidly Developing Countries explores the impact of such diverse exchange control regimes in both historical and regional contexts, focusing particular attention on East Asia. This comprehensive, carefully researched volume will surely become a standard reference for scholars and policymakers.

''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 examines the influence of fiscal policy on exchange rates, recent development in the econometric modelling of exchange rates, and exchange rate modelling for developing countries.

"Exchange Rate Theory presents a novel and elegant theory to explain the excessive variability of foreign exchange rate returns. The theory is novel in the sense that it focuses on interaction between market agents as the primary source of the variability in those speculative prices. It is shown that simple interactions between market participants using different information is sufficient to generate deterministic chaos." "In the first part of this book the authors survey existing exchange rate theories and ask whether these theories are useful in explaining actual exchange rate movements. They demonstrate that the 1970s were characterized by the belief that exchange rates could be understood by an analysis of the fundamentals (inflation rates, interest rates and monetary policy). Subsequently, this belief has all but disappeared but researchers have been content to analyze the statistical properties of exchange rates, abandoning the theory and the models." "The second part of the book uses chaos theory to construct an innovative framework for the understanding of exchange markets. These models, which integrate fundamentalism and chartism, create complex exchange rate movements which appear to be random. These models are used to explain several of the anomalies observed in exchange rate markets and to evaluate the possibility of exchange rate prediction."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved