Working Paper 6 March 2015 Rajlakshmi De and Charles Becker Understanding the role of foreign aid in poverty alleviation is one of the central inquiries of development economics. To augment past cross-country studies, this paper offers a first step toward addressing the absence of disaggregated estimates of the allocation and impact of foreign aid. Newly geocoded aid project data from Malawi ar...

This paper is motivated by the popular view that the surge in China’s foreign exchange reserves is due to a distortionary exchange rate policy aimed at keeping the real exchange rate undervalued to support export-led growth. It undertakes an in-depth empirical investigation to quantify how much "mercantilist" and "precautionary" motives have contributed to the reserve build-up in China during 1...

So far, various contributions have failed to explain Asia’s fat foreign currency reserve accumulation. In this paper, I analyze reserve holding decisions in a wider social, political, and economic context. Using Weber’s heuristic of ideas and interests as determinants of actions, I show that Asian countries' reserve accumulation is caused by a paradigm shift. In Asia’s former Development State ...

At the end of 2010 China’s foreign exchange reserve reached $2847.34 billion, the author designs the maximum government utility function when consider the China government buys a part foreign exchange if company earns, it means that the China government will increase Ren-Min-Bi Yuan. And it will cause inflation. The inflation will cause disutility to government. Finally it gets the optimal fuct...

The author thanks James Heintz whose knowledge and assistance was extensive and invaluable; Bob Pollin, for many useful discussions; and Andong Zhu, for help with data. All remaining errors are of my own making. 2 Abstract The South African Reserve Bank and Ministry of Finance have adopted inflation targeting and the gradual relaxation of exchange controls (along with control of public spending...

Working papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment on research in progress. They may not have been subject to the formal editorial review accorded official Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland publications. The views stated herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank...

The objective of this paper is to examine whether India has reached a stage of financial development when full capital account convertibility could be introduced. In its report on capital account convertibility the Tarapore Committee provided a succinct and subtle definition: capital account convertibility is the freedom to convert local financial assets into foreign financial assets and vice-v...

Over the last decade, the ownership of the banking sector in Latin America has changed hands from local shareholders to large foreign banks from Spain and the United States. It is also a fact that the foreign exchange market in these countries has been segmented through various kinds of restrictions, because the central bank is unable to function as a lender of last resort in a currency other t...