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There is increasing interest in regional trade, investment, and currency blocs, and in the optimal public policies for such blocs. There is also much managerial interest in the co-movement of exchange rates in a region. The Eastern Caribbean Currency Bloc is one of only three (and one of the longer lasting) multi-country common central banks in the world and is the only such bank in which member countries pool all their foreign reserves. While it is an important economic region especially for the United States, most studies of regional exchange rate relationships have not examined the nature of Caribbean exchange rates. This paper documents for the first time that purchasing power parity holds for each exchange rate and many real exchange rates are cointegrated and move in a bloc in the Eastern Caribbean region over the 1980s and 1990s.

We study the interaction of fiscal and monetary policies during a currency crisis in an economy with government nominal liabilities. We show that the stock and maturity of these liabilities are key determinants of the magnitude, timing and predictability of a devaluation. Among notable features of our model, monetary authorities defend the currency parity conditional on the level of the interest rate, rather than on the stock of international reserves; budget deficits need not be high before a currency crisis; post- devaluation inflation may exhibit little persistence, and money demand need not fall after the crisis.

This paper revisits the currency crises model of Aghion, Bacchetta and Banerjee (2000, 2001, 2004), who show that if there exist nominal price rigidities and private sector credit constraints, and the credit multiplier depends on real interest rates, then the optimal monetary policy response to the threat of a currency crisis is restrictive. We demonstrate that this result is primarily due to the uncovered interest parity assumption. Assuming that the exchange rate is a martingale restores the case for expansionary reaction - even with foreign-currency debt in firms' balance sheets. The effect of lower interest rates on output can help restore the value of the currency due to increased money demand.

Questions of the choice of parameters of real currency rate and size and structure of gold and foreign currency reserves for the countries with unconvertible currency are considered in the article. It is proposed to search for optimum currency rate on the basis of minimizing probabilistic characteristics of damage from the sum of two kinds of inflation — evolutionary and interventionist. The optimal total size and structure of gold and foreign currency reserves can be calculated on the basis of the probabilistic distribution "efficiency-risk" received as a result of the decision of the problem of searching optimal distribution by a share in an investment portfolio with one nonlinear share. The minimum of damage from service of reserves is taken as a criterion of optimality.