A currency basket and future exchange rate arrangements in Asia

Due not only to a dominant role of the US dollar in regional trade and financial transactions but also to de facto US dollar pegged exchange rate policy,Asian countries cannot avoid exchange rate risks between their own currency and the US dollar.In recent years,however,the Chinese government has actively promoted the Renminbi(RMB)internationalisation especially in intermational trade.In December 2015,China introduced a new exchange rate index against a basket of 13 trade-weighted currencies,which can be considered a major turning point from the US dollar standard toward a more flexible currency basket system.However,the estimated implicit basket weights reveal that several Asian economies still tend to stabilise their currencies against the US dollar,while Malaysia and Singapore have stabilised their currencies against RMB in recent years.Since the internationalisation of local currencies and regional monetary arrangements are typically facilitated with each other,further progress of RMB internationalisation is expected to promote a leading role of China in establishing regional exchange rate policy coordination.

To Accomplish the Unaccomplished Reform： Lessons and Options of RMB Exchange Rate Reform

The exchange rate reform initiated on August 11,2015 is an important attempt by the PBoC to transform China's exchange rate regime from the "crawl-like arrangement" to a floating regime.However,after a three-day experiment,the PBoC abandoned the original goal of the reform.Since then,the central bank has implemented a new exchange rate-setting mechanism.Under this mechanism,the central parity of the renminbi(RMB) against the US dollar is decided by the arithmetic average of the RMB exchange rate that keeps the index of a currency basket unchanged over the past 24 hours and the previous day's closing price of USD/CNY.Due to the introduction of the index of a currency basket,additional uncertainty has been introduced into the determination of the RMB exchange rate,because of the uncertainty of the dollar index(USDX).As a result,to a certain extent,the one-way bet on the RMB expectations is weakened.However,the current exchange rate formation mechanism cannot reverse the trend of devaluation of the RMB,nor can it eliminate depreciation expectations.Meanwhile,it hinders the effectiveness of central bank's independent monetary policy based on the domestic economic fundamentals.And also,the "two-way float" created by the new price-setting mechanism is artificial and has led to significant losses of foreign exchange reserve.The paper explains how the new price-setting mechanism works,and identifies the important features of the mechanism and its pros and cons.The paper argues that despite some advantages,the new exchange rate regime as a soft peg regime is not sustainable and the PBoC should stop foreign exchange market intervention as soon as possible.We hope that the PBoC can learn the lessons from the failure of the "August 11 reform" and accomplish the unaccomplished reform in an urgent manner.