Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/233057 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
QUCEH Working Paper Series No. 21-02
Publisher: 
Queen's University Centre for Economic History (QUCEH), Belfast
Abstract: 
How does international monetary leadership end? This paper examines the decline of the Sterling Area between 1945 and 1979 to understand the process of international economic disintegration. Using an original cross-national panel dataset, we conduct survival analysis which systematically evaluates a comprehensive set of economic and political factors about when and why countries chose to leave the Sterling Area. We find that membership of the Sterling Area was determined by multidimensional aspects. Our results highlight the significance of international economic and geopolitical factors, such as trade and diplomatic alignment, on the decision to leave. However we also find that domestic political and historical factors, such as democracy and imperial legacy, played a role in the Sterling Area's unravelling. Finally, we use our results to examine the experience of individual countries and their decisions to leave the Sterling Area. Revisiting this history of a gradually dissolving economic order, played out in the shadow of Britain's waning imperial and economic power, has cautionary implications for the future of the US dollar order.
Subjects: 
The Sterling Area
international monetary regime
internationalcurrency
sterling
decline
disintegration
JEL: 
N10
F02
F22
F33
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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