Liberalization Sequencing and Currency Instability: A Case Study of 20 Emerging Economies

Abstract Financial crises and currency instabilities within developing and emerging economies during the last decade had a tremendous impact on the economic performance and increased vulnerability of economies against domestic and foreign shocks. The timing of capital liberalization is one of the significant debates among other issues related to currency instability, and it would be more convenient to take this policy whenever the economy is ready for it. In this study trade openness is assumed to be a perquisite for capital liberalization. The aim is to see whether the capital liberalization without enough trade openness would be a possible factor for the currency instability. To reach to this aim, a sample of emerging countries for the period of 1998-2009 is selected. A Probit Panel Data model is used to estimate the parameters of the model. The parameters are all found to be significant and support the main idea of this study.