Exchange rate regimes, misalignments and global imbalances: issues and lessons for developing and developed countries.

Summary This thesis aims to study the link between exchange rate regimes, exchange rate misalignments and global imbalances. It is conducted in the context of an evolving panel of economies ranging from developing to developed countries. It covers three main themes. First, we examine exchange rate misalignments in the CFA zone and the proposed monetary union in West Africa. We then study the implications of a country's choice of exchange rate regime on its resilience to external imbalances. Finally, we analyze the influence of exchange rate misalignments on the persistence of global imbalances, as well as the interactions between macroeconomic imbalances.We show that the anchor currency (the euro) plays a predominant role in explaining CFA franc misalignments, all else being equal, including the fundamentals of the CFA franc. Based on a new methodology based on the synchronization of misalignments that we propose, we show that there are similarities between the WAEMU countries, Ghana, The Gambia and Sierra Leone in the context of a monetary union. We show that the persistence of current account imbalances is strongly and asymmetrically related to exchange rate misalignments in developed countries and that macroeconomic imbalances interact strongly through a causal relationship.