Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/109370 
Year of Publication: 
2009
Series/Report no.: 
ADB Economics Working Paper Series No. 170
Publisher: 
Asian Development Bank (ADB), Manila
Abstract: 
Developing Asian countries have accumulated foreign exchange reserves on an unprecedented scale in recent years. There is a growing consensus that Asia's reserves now substantially exceed the levels required for precautionary purposes or for self-protection against currency crisis. The central objective of our paper is to informally and formally test whether reserves in developing Asia have in fact reached excessive levels. Informal tests of reserve adequacy based on widely used rules of thumb such as the Greenspan-Guidotti rule unambiguously indicate the presence of sizable excess reserves. To test for excess reserves more formally, we use panel-data econometric analysis based on Edison (2003). Our estimation results indicate the presence of large and growing excess reserves since 2002. The results of both informal and formal tests thus confirm the popular belief that developing Asia now has excessive foreign exchange reserves. Therefore, the short-run policy challenge for Asian governments is to manage the region's burgeoning excess reserves more actively and use them more productively. One promising area of future research, brought to the fore by the global financial crisis, is to develop more nuanced measures of reserve adequacy that take into account the possibility of severe negative shocks.
Subjects: 
Foreign exchange reserve
Asia
JEL: 
F31
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
529.98 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.