Effects of Currency Devaluations on the Economic Growth in Developing Countries: The Role of Foreign Currency-Denominated Debt

Saibene, Giacomo, Sicouri, Silvia, Atlantic Economic Journal

Introduction

Assuming that a developing country needs capital inflows from foreign investors, either to pursue economic growth or as a result of trading activities, and that to access international capital markets it has to denominate its debts in the currencies of the principal creditor countries and financial centres (i.e., U.S. Dollar, Yen, Euro, Sterling, and Swiss Franc), how do these assumptions affect the country's economic performance when a currency devaluation occurs?

In economic textbooks, the conventional answer to currency devaluations is analyzed within the Mundell-Fleming model and the result is a positive effect on the current account. Thus, devaluation is expansionary in terms of GDP since exports increase more than imports. This model might be naturally extended by considering many other important features, which determine the degree of the reaction of the current account, such as: (i) the price elasticity of world's (country's) demand for tradable goods, i.e., the variation of the exports (imports) in response to a real exchange rate variation; and (ii) the presence of supply shocks effects due to the presence of intermediate inputs and raw materials, e.g., oil, which might generate inflationary pressures.

Nonetheless, given the fact that the country's debt is denominated in foreign currencies, a real exchange rate variation can also cause some important balance sheet effects. First, government spending can be significantly reduced if constrained by rules aimed at avoiding a deficit increase, since a larger amount of money would then be required for interest payments over sovereign debt. Second, private investment and consumption can diminish, given that debt service costs increase, profits shrink, and bank lending is constrained (since it relies on the collateral that the firm can provide, i.e., the firm's value calculated as the net present value of its future returns). The result is a level of investment that is negatively affected. Moreover, the banking sector can be negatively hit by currency devaluation because of the currency mismatches between its assets and liabilities; hence the probability of a financial crisis increases, a fact that would severely worsen the country's economic condition. Finally, a negative wealth effect on national investors, who mainly have assets denominated in national currency and debts denominated in foreign currency, might amplify the volatility of capital flows and introduce the possibility of sudden stops, current account reversals, and self-fulfilling crises. This paper evaluates the net effect of a real exchange variation, focusing on the impact of balance sheet effects and demonstrating that currency devaluations can be contractionary.

Different aspects point out the importance of this issue: a better understanding of the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and the way it was managed; the rising importance of developing countries in the global financial system and their relationships with debt; the currency in which it is denominated; the consequences of the existence of some currencies that are more important than others; and the increasing amount of global debt. Moreover, it may suggest some indications about the current Greek debt crisis, since some have argued that a hypothetical solution is a temporary exit from the Eurozone, which would then allow them to devaluate the currency and improve its competitive problems, thus avoiding a default on its debts. But are they denominated in Euros, a forthcoming foreign currency, or not?

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In the next section, a review is presented in brief of the literature that focuses on the causes of foreign currency debt, then the strand of literature that introduced the contractionary effects of devaluations is explored, and finally the third generation of currency crisis models is presented. In following section, there is a detailed description of the model, mainly based on Aghion et al. (2001), in order to use it as the theoretical foundation of empirical analysis that is done in the section after that. The conclusions are in the final section.

Literature Review

Dealing with Foreign Currency Debt

In order to access international capital markets, a developing country has to denominate its debts in the currencies of the principal creditor countries and financial centres: U.S. Dollars, Yen, Euros, Pounds, and Swiss Francs. How robust is this hypothesis?

Citing Eichengreen and Hausmann (2005), at the end of 2001, Americans held $84 billion of developing country debt, but only $2.6 billion was denominated in the currencies of the developing countries. Of the $434 billion of debt securities issued by developing countries in international markets that was outstanding on average between 1999 and 2001, less than $12 billion was denominated in the currency of these countries. The disproportion between these figures suggests that the problem cannot be entirely explicable in terms of the weakness of policies and institutions. If the issue is fear that a borrower may be tempted to inflate away debt denominated in their own currency, then we should observe inflation-indexed debt, not dollar-denominated debt. Therefore this problem has at least as much to do with the structure and operation of the international financial system as with any institutions' weakness. It is as if emerging markets suffer from an inherited burden, almost irrespective of the policies of their governments. This is why the difficulty they face in borrowing abroad in their own currencies is referred to as original sin (1999). Evidence suggests that the relative size of an economy is a robust factor accounting for the incidence of original sin, and this would be the predicted result if economies of scale, network externalities or liquidity effects were important.

Yet again, Eichengreen et al. (2003) pointed out the differences between three concepts widely used in the literature on balance sheet factors in emerging market financial crises: original sin, debt intolerance, and currency mismatches. The first two seek to explain the same phenomenon, but while the debt-intolerance school traces the problem to institutional weaknesses of emerging-market economies, the original-sin school points at the structure of global portfolios and international financial markets. The literature on currency mismatches, in contrast, is concerned about the consequences of these problems and how the macroeconomic and financial authorities manage them.

Another important issue is the analysis of the breakdown of a country's balance sheet, because it can better show the vulnerabilities to reversals in external financing flows and helps to examine the genesis of such reversals. Indeed, weaknesses in certain sectorial balance sheets may contribute to the creation of a countrywide balance of payments crisis, yet they may not appear in a country's aggregate balance sheet. An important example is foreign currency debt between residents, which is netted out of the country's aggregated balance sheet. Nevertheless, if the government is unable to roll over its hard currency debts to residents and must draw on its reserves to honor its debts, such a situation can trigger an external balance of payments crisis. The risk that difficulties rolling over domestic debts can spill over into a balance of payments crisis is particularly severe in a world where capital accounts have been liberalized (Allen et al. 2002).

In a recent article, Hausmann …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: Effects of Currency Devaluations on the Economic Growth in Developing Countries: The Role of Foreign Currency-Denominated Debt. Contributors: Saibene, Giacomo - Author, Sicouri, Silvia - Author. Journal title: Atlantic Economic Journal. Volume: 40. Issue: 2 Publication date: June 2012. Page number: 191+. © 1999 Atlantic Economic Society. COPYRIGHT 2012 Gale Group.

This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.