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Djibril Diop Mambety's 1994 film Le Franc explores experiences of disruption and powerlessness caused by monetary devaluation. This paper examines the cinematic grammars of Mambety's film as they relate to currency devaluation. The CFA franc was devalued by 50 percent on January 12, 1994. The devaluation, imposed on countries in the franc zone, represents an instrument of financial control that restrains their monetary sovereignty, perpetuating vestiges of imperialism. Analyzing Mambety's cinematic language, I offer a reading of his film through these economic structures. He works against the forms of temporal disruption introduced by processes of financialization in general and by the devaluation in particular. Ultimately, by embracing the future-past tense, Mambety reaches into a future that has still yet to come, wresting comedy and even hope out of intolerable economic and social realities and offering a radical vision of possibility in the midst of degradation.

Using input–output data from Symmetric Input–Output Tables for the year 2010 and relevant price models, this paper provides empirical estimations of medium- and long-run effects of wage and currency devaluations on international price competitiveness and income distribution for two ‘PIIGS economies’, i.e. Greece and Italy. The findings reveal certain differentiated socio-technical production conditions in the economies under consideration casting doubt on the effectiveness of demand-switching policy measures implemented in the post-2010 Eurozone economy. At the same time, however, wage devaluation is found to be a comparatively slow and inefficient process to improve international price competitiveness in the medium-run.

Currency manipulations, the intentional intervention in the foreign exchange market by a country’s government or central bank, have been a contentious issue in international trade. However, empirical evidence on the matter is scarce. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating the effect of currency manipulations on the US bilateral trade balance with its major trading partners over a long-term period of 2000Q4 to 2020Q2. By using a novel currency manipulation index based on the US Treasury-defined variables and a combination of time series and panel cointegration approaches, this study uses a dataset of 21 major trading partners of the US. The analysis shows that currency manipulations have a statistically significant negative effect on the US bilateral trade balance with some country-level heterogeneity. The study provides new insights on the role of currency manipulations in international trade and implies that the findings have significant policy implications. By providing evidence of the detrimental effect of currency manipulations on trade balance, this study supports the argument for the need of international agreements and regulations to discourage such practices and promote fairness in global trade.

This book examines the very concept, history, critique, and impact on the overall economy and black money, the move toward less-cash economy and digitalization, government–RBI relations, along with an assessment of two years of demonetization. Demonetization has created a severe macroeconomic shock. The measure was humungous in scale and led to a sharp contraction in money supply for a short period. Although demonetization's proponents have contended that it would cleanse the economy of black money and make transactions more formal and digital, its implementation certainly could have been better. The effects of demonetization on the Indian economy are debatable and will vary by sector. Its effectiveness will be talked about and studied by economists and policy makers for decades to come. Demonetization has made only a minor dent in the GDP. It has helped to bring more people into the tax net and has reduced the size of the informal economy. With the increased use of digital payments, economic transactions become recorded. This book examines the very concept, history, critique, and impact on the overall economy and black money, the move toward less-cash economy and digitalization, government–RBI relations, along with an assessment of two years of demonetization. It would be prudent for the government to focus more on proper institutional reforms to address the issues originating from demonetization.

In September 1985, emissaries of the world's five leading industrial nations--the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan--secretly gathered at the Plaza Hotel in New York City and unveiled an unprecedented effort to correct the largest set of current account and exchange rate imbalances that had ever threatened the world economy. The Plaza Accord is credited with sharply realigning exchange rates, significantly reducing current account imbalances, and countering protectionist pressures in the United States. But did the Accord provide a foundation for ongoing international financial stability and policy coordination? Or was it simply a unique one-time coincidence of national interests? The Plaza experience continues to inform today's debates about the limits and possibilities of international monetary cooperation. In late 2015, leading policymakers and economists--including those who were involved in the Accord's design, negotiation, and implementation--held a Plaza Retrospective conference at the Baker Institute for Public Policy to evaluate the Accord's legacy and how its collaborative spirit can be applied today. This volume presents their views and analyses to provide guidance for a time when the world again faces the prospect of currency disequilibria, growing imbalances, trade policy reactions, and thus uncertainty for both the global economy and world politics. Data disclosure: The data underlying the analysis in this volume are available. The data used in chapter 14 are taken directly from William Cline's Policy Briefs 15-8 and 15-20, with the exception that they have been manipulated with a key assumption stated in the chapter.

We study the impact of large exchange rate devaluations on the cost of living at different points on the income distribution. Poor households spend relatively more on tradeable product categories and consume lower-priced varieties within categories. Changes in the relative price of tradeables and of lower-priced varieties affect the cost of living of low-income relative to high-income households. We quantify these effects following the 1994 Mexican devaluation and show that they can have large distributional consequences. Two years post-devaluation, the cost of living for the bottom income decile rose 1.48 to 1.62 times more than for the top income decile.

Exchange rate manipulation—the active devaluation of a currency through intervention in the foreign exchange market—is a frequent trigger of international disputes. Yet it is not an obvious policy choice: as a blunt tool to boost export competitiveness, it is disliked by citizens and importers because of the loss of purchasing power it entails, and because it benefits those with investment abroad at the expense of those with savings at home. It is thus notable that a group of East Asian countries, from Japan and Korea to Thailand, undertake frequent and often large interventions to devalue their currencies. What explains their policy choice? We provide evidence that exchange rate depreciations are undertaken at the behest of export industries. Because lobbying activities in East Asian countries are not directly observable, we focus on Japan and Korea and construct a proxy measure of lobbying by exporters, drawing on news reports. We use machine learning to scale daily reports of industry demands in the two leading financial newspapers, the Japanese Nihon Keizai Shimbun and, in a robustness check, the Korean Hankyung, over twenty-five years. We find evidence that mounting public pressure by organized economic interest groups precedes intervention and induces currency depreciation.

We show that even when the exchange rate cannot be devalued, a small set of conventional fiscal instruments can robustly replicate the real allocations attained under a nominal exchange rate devaluation in a dynamic New Keynesian open economy environment. We perform the analysis under alternative pricing assumptions—producer or local currency pricing, along with nominal wage stickiness; under arbitrary degrees of asset market completeness and for general stochastic sequences of devaluations. There are two types of fiscal policies equivalent to an exchange rate devaluation—one, a uniform increase in import tariff and export subsidy, and two, a value-added tax increase and a uniform payroll tax reduction. When the devaluations are anticipated, these policies need to be supplemented with a consumption tax reduction and an income tax increase. These policies are revenue neutral. In certain cases equivalence requires, in addition, a partial default on foreign bond holders. We discuss the issues of implementation of these policies, in particular, under the circumstances of a currency union.

This paper proposes a new mechanism linking trade and wage inequality in developing countries-the quality-upgrading mechanism-and investigates its empirical implications in panel data on Mexican manufacturing plants. In a model with heterogeneous plants and quality differentiatiation, more productive plants produce higher-quality goods than less productive plants, and they pay higher wages to maintain a higher-quality workforce. Only the most productive plants enter the export market, and Southern exporters produce higher-quality goods for export than for the domestic market, to appeal to richer Northern consumers. An exchange-rate devaluation leads more-productive Southern plants to increase exports, upgrade quality, and raise wages relative to less-productive plants within the same industry, increasing within-industry wage dispersion. Using the late-1994 peso crisis as a source of variation and a variety of proxies for plant productivity, I find that initially more productive plants increased the export share of sales, white-collar wages, blue-collar wages, the relative wage of white-collar workers, and ISO 9000 certification more than initially less productive plants during the peso crisis period and that these differential changes were greater than in periods without devaluations before and after the crisis period. These findings support the hypothesis that quality upgrading induced by the exchange-rate shock increased within-industry wage inequality.

We apply insights from “new, new” trade theory to explain a puzzling decline in US firm antidumping (AD) filings in an era of persistent foreign currency undervaluations and increasing import competition. Firms exhibit heterogeneity both within and across industries regarding foreign direct investment (FDI). We propose that firms making vertical or resource-seeking investments abroad will be less likely to file AD petitions, and firms are likely to undertake vertical FDI in the context of currency undervaluation. Hence, we argue, the increasing vertical FDI of US firms makes trade disputes far less likely. We use firm-level data to examine the universe of US manufacturing firms and find that AD filers generally conduct no intrafirm trade with filed-against countries. We also find that persistent currency undervaluation is associated over time with increased vertical FDI and intrafirm trade by US multinational corporations (MNCs) in the undervaluing country. Among larger US MNCs, the likelihood of an AD filing is negatively associated with increases in intrafirm trade. In the context of currency undervaluation, we confirm the existing finding that undervaluation is associated with more AD filings. We also find, however, that high levels of intrafirm imports from countries with undervalued currencies significantly decrease the likelihood of AD filings. Our study highlights the centrality of firm heterogeneity in international trade and investment in understanding political mobilization over international economic policy.