Designing Appropriate Exchange Rate Regimes for East Asia: Inflation Targeting and Monetary Policy Rules

While favoring relatively more flexible regimes, emerging economies in East Asia and elsewhere appear to heavily manage their currencies despite being officially described as “floaters”. In other words, revealed preferences of regional monetary authorities appear to indicate a high degree of “fear of floating”. The paper first explores the reasons for this fear of floating. It then goes on to examine the case for and operational mechanics behind an open inflation targeting regime which has increasingly been advocated for small and open economies in East Asia and elsewhere. The paper also attempts a reconciliation between the discussion of analytics behind open economy inflation targeting and its implications for exchange rate design, on the one hand, and actual exchange rate ongoings in East Asia, on the other.