A New Comparative Study on the Free‐floating and Currency Board Regimes in Hong Kong

Abstract

This study aims to compare the performance of free‐floating and currency board regimes for Hong Kong by examining historical data of the two on the output growth and inflation rate. Structural vector autoregression has been applied in the empirical analysis. Without making a strong assumption of unit variance in the residual matrix, this study applies a more natural approach proposed by Cecchetti and Rich to recover the structural parameters. The study has further investigated the recovery of the economy under a demand shock under different exchange rate regimes, in order to provide some evidence to answer why Hong Kong's recovery process after the Asian financial crisis is relatively longer than that in other economies with a managed floating exchange rate regime. New evidence in this study indicates that output recovers much faster in a flexible exchange rate regime than in a fixed exchange rate regime after an aggregate demand shock. Furthermore, this study has applied a more robust method in the counterfactual analysis when comparing the two regimes. New evidence in this study suggests that a free‐floating regime may generate much smaller output variance in Hong Kong and deliver higher output and price levels to Hong Kong.