Did China Effectively Manage Its Foreign Exchange Reserves? Revisiting the Currency Composition Change

Kai Shi and Li Nie

Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, 2017, vol. 53, issue 6, 1352-1373

Abstract: To estimate the currency composition of China’s foreign exchange reserves and assess its effectiveness of management, the constrained least square method and variance sensitive analysis are utilized, respectively. Based on portfolio accounting identities, the change of foreign exchange reserves was decomposed into the net purchase change and the non-purchase change. The newly constructed non-purchase change was used to estimate the latent currency composition. Empirical results show that by the end of 2015Q1, China held about 63.6% of its reserves in the U.S. dollar, 19.6% in the euro, 3.09% in the Japanese yen, 4.89% in the pound sterling, 2.22% in the Canadian dollar, 2.03% in the Australian dollar, and 0.09% in the Swiss franc. Although the currency composition kept relatively stable, more attention had been paid to the emerging international currencies. China decreased the U.S. dollar share during the subprime crisis, while resorted to the portfolio rebalance strategy since 2011. The euro share and the pound sterling share declined during the European sovereign debt crisis. The first derivative of the U.S. dollar was positive while those of other currencies were negative before 2014Q3, and vice versa after 2014Q4. In general, the currency composition management of China’s foreign exchange reserves was effective.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1540496X.2017.1300771 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:mes:emfitr:v:53:y:2017:i:6:p:1352-1373

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/MREE20

DOI: 10.1080/1540496X.2017.1300771

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Emerging Markets Finance and Trade from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().