Will the U.S. Dollar Continue to Dominate World Trade?

Mary Amiti, Oleg Itskhoki and Jozef Konings

No 20220621, Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: There are around 180 currencies in the world, but only a very small number of them play an outsized role in international trade, finance, and central bank foreign exchange reserves. In the modern era, the U.S. dollar has a dominant international presence, followed to a lesser extent by the euro and a handful of other currencies. Although the use of specific currencies is remarkably stable over time, with the status of dominant currencies remaining unchanged over decades, there have been decisive shifts in the international monetary system over long horizons. For example, the British pound only lost its dominant currency status in the 1930s, well after Britain stopped being the leading world economy. In a new study, we show that the currency that is used in international trade transactions is an active firm-level decision rather than something that is just fixed. This finding raises the question of what factors could augment or reduce the U.S. dollar’s dominance in world trade.

Keywords: currency invoicing; exporters; trade; US dollar (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E2 F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-06-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-ifn, nep-int, nep-mac, nep-mon and nep-pay
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2022 ... ominate-world-trade/ Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednls:94360

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().