Globalization of financial markets and the demand for international reserves : the case of the industrialized countries

The purpose of this thesis is to explain theoretically and empirically the demand for international reserves by the major industrialized countries in the context of the present highly integrated and extremely volatile international financial system. The reserves demand behaviour of each of the G7 countries along with seven non-G7 industrialized countries have been empirically examined. The demand functions are estimated using the cointegration approach on autoregressive distributed lag and simple distributed lag models.This study has revealed that a country's reserve demand is significantly influenced by its level of capital flows in addition to the traditionally used trade flow variables. It is shown that the greater the external vulnerability of an economy as measured by its net capital flows in relation to its GNP, the higher is its demand for international reserves. The results have striking similarity for all the 14 industrialized countries despite their structural and institutional differences.This study points to the need of international monetary policy coordination to reduce large fluctuations in exchange rates and lessen massive flows of speculative capital which carry a potential threat of becoming inflationary