Post-crisis exchange rate regimes in East Asia

More than five years after the onset of the Asian crisis, the characteristics of the exchange rate regimes of East Asian economies remain a topic of considerable discussion. In the pre-crisis period, it was fairly evident that currencies of most East Asian economies maintained de facto pegs to the US dollar. Among the East Asian economies, Hong Kong was the only East Asian economy that adopted the fixed exchange rate regime backed by a currency board arrangement. It was, however, well-known that currencies in the other East Asian economies had maintained highly stable values against the US dollar since the mid-1980s [see, for example, Frankel and Wei (1994), Kwan (1995), Goldberg and Klein (1997), and McKinnon (2001)].3