In this reexamination of Canada's balance of payments experience under the gold standard, the authors develop and empirically test a new portfolio approach to the mechanism of balance of payments adjustment. This adjustment mechanism responded to massive inflows of foreign capital during a critical period of Canada's economic growth in the early years of this century. The authors show that the existence of international mobility of capital requires a fundamental revision of the price-specie-flow theory that has traditionally been used to explain adjustment when the balance of payments was more nearly dominated by the balance of trade. The approach Professors Dick and Floyd take not only answers the critics of Jacob Viner, who first explored the Canadian case after 1900, but also offers a new perspective on how the gold standard in general actually worked. The authors apply standard elementary economic principles to this working of the balance of payments under the gold standard, making this book useful reading for those studying intermediate and upper level economics, especially in the field of international finance.

A careful basic theoretical and econometric analysis of the factors determining the real exchange rates of Canada, the U.K., Japan, France and Germany with respect to the United States is conducted. The resulting conclusion is that real exchange rates are almost entirely determined by real factors relating to growth and technology such as oil and commodity prices, international allocations of world investment across countries, and underlying terms of trade changes. Unanticipated money supply shocks, calculated in five alternative ways have virtually no effects. A Blanchard-Quah VAR analysis also indicates that the effects of real shocks predominate over monetary shocks by a wide margin. The implications of these facts for the conduct of monetary policy in countries outside the U.S. are then explored leading to the conclusion that all countries, to avoid exchange rate overshooting, have tended to automatically follow the same monetary policy as the United States. The history of world monetary policy is reviewed along with the determination of real exchange rates within the Euro Area.

A careful basic theoretical and econometric analysis of the factors determining the real exchange rates of Canada, the U.K., Japan, France and Germany with respect to the United States is conducted. The resulting conclusion is that real exchange rates are almost entirely determined by real factors relating to growth and technology such as oil and commodity prices, international allocations of world investment across countries, and underlying terms of trade changes. Unanticipated money supply shocks, calculated in five alternative ways have virtually no effects. A Blanchard-Quah VAR analysis also indicates that the effects of real shocks predominate over monetary shocks by a wide margin. The implications of these facts for the conduct of monetary policy in countries outside the U.S. are then explored leading to the conclusion that all countries, to avoid exchange rate overshooting, have tended to automatically follow the same monetary policy as the United States. The history of world monetary policy is reviewed along with the determination of real exchange rates within the Euro Area.

In this reexamination of Canada's balance of payments experience under the gold standard, the authors develop and empirically test a new portfolio approach to the mechanism of balance of payments adjustment. This adjustment mechanism responded to massive inflows of foreign capital during a critical period of Canada's economic growth in the early years of this century. The authors show that the existence of international mobility of capital requires a fundamental revision of the price-specie-flow theory that has traditionally been used to explain adjustment when the balance of payments was more nearly dominated by the balance of trade. The approach Professors Dick and Floyd take not only answers the critics of Jacob Viner, who first explored the Canadian case after 1900, but also offers a new perspective on how the gold standard in general actually worked. The authors apply standard elementary economic principles to this working of the balance of payments under the gold standard, making this book useful reading for those studying intermediate and upper level economics, especially in the field of international finance.