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The short retort to that demand is: overvalue the national currency. That is exactly what Costa Rica has been doing for more than two decades. Throughout the years since 1984, under a ideas of daily mini-devaluations, the dollar exchange rate for the Costa Rica colon was gently increased. But in most years the domestic rate of inflation exceeded by any ration points the devaluation rate. In 2006 the Central Bank supplanted the mini-devaluations with a ideas of bands in which the colon was allowed to float between lower and upper limits with the upper limit gently increasing, in July 2010 reaching 610 colons for one dollar with a floor of 500. Then, starting in October 2009 the colon gained value precipitously, the exchange rate falling from 590 in October 2009 to 510 in May, 2010. From May to July 2010 the rate has fluctuated between 515 and 530. If this continues for any length of time the Costa Rican economy will greatly suffer.
An overvalued currency harms exports, subsidizes imports, exacerbates equilibrium of cost problems, negatively effects tourism and foreign residents with dollar incomes, deters foreign investment, inflates real estate prices, and invites currency speculation.
Costa Rica has an economy very dependent on export earnings. If exporters try to increase their prices to compensate for a weak dollar a strong colon means less competitively priced products on international markets. If prices cannot be increased, as is ordinarily the case, businesses must nevertheless pay their operating costs in colons while receiving fewer in return for the dollars earned-- 92% of export earnings are in dollars, but 70% of costs are in colons.
With an overvalued colon imports become relatively cheaper. This has the adverse consequence of encouraging import of goods that compete with locally based production. The buyer goods manufactures in Costa Rica is relatively well-developed, with some sectors also geared to exporting to Central America. Historically, national production has been to some extent protected by import tariffs. These are now largely being eliminated under the provisions of Cafta, the Central American Free Trade business agreement with the United States implemented under the Arias Administration. The compound of an overvalued colon and the elimination of protective tariffs could mean that some sectors of domestic manufactures will go under.
While the economy began to recover in late 2009 from the internationally induced recession, Costa Rica maintains a lasting problem with equilibrium of cost deficits. The compound of reduced or lower valued export earnings and increased import expenditures impels the equilibrium of payments into added deficit. During the first Quarter of 2010 exports, lead by pineapple and bananas, grew 11% with respect to Q1, 2009. However, as might be thinkable, with cheapened dollars, imports increased 24% in the same period, widening the current catalogue deficit.
The critical foreign exchange earner in Costa Rica is tourism, an manufactures with earnings in dollars but expenditures in colons. For visiting foreigners Costa Rica is no longer a bargain. When word gets colse to in the United States and elsewhere that their dollars don't go very far, tourism will suffer.
An overvalued currency is a prophylactic to foreign investment, a central element in the development strategy of the Arias government and the current administration. For a foreign firm to institute and operate a firm in Costa Rica they must exchange dollars for colons and these won't go nearly as far as they should.
There are many thousands of foreigners resident in Costa Rica that depend upon pensions or other earnings in dollars. In the months since late 2009 foreign residents have been hit hard in their pockets, a 15% decline in value of the dollars they exchange, plus suffering additionally from a 4% domestic inflation in the cost of goods and services. The nation has programs to attract foreign retirees that will fail if their dollars won't go very far. So too will programs like curative tourism suffer.
The real estate market is negatively effected by overvaluation of the colon. Sellers roughly all the time list their property in dollars, so there is now a higher price. This is a problem in that many real estate sales are to foreigners. This problem is seriously compounded by the appreciation of real estate values over the last decade. Even During the 2008 and 2009 financial bust and international recession, when real estate most anywhere in the world was falling in price, this was not commonly the case in Costa Rica. There has been a very inelastic price response to abundant offerings of properties of all types and falling demand. All real estate fellowships article a ample decline in business.
The current exchange rate opens the door to currency speculation. Windfall profits will accrue to those who buy dollars when the rate is near the floor and sell them for colons when the rate returns toward the upper limit, as should at last happen, assuming the Central Bank authorities have any sense.
In fact, the drop in the value of the dollar when the same currency is strengthening against the Euro is connected to an apparent influx of speculative capital and wealthy Costa Ricans changing currencies. In the United States and Europe interest rates are very low and the economies stagnant, whereas in Costa Rica interest rates are quite high and the economy, so far at least in spite of high interest rates and tight credit, is modestly recovering.
Why the Central Bank maintains high interest rates while the economy needs stimulation is one more indication that something is wrong in the higher circles of power. So dollars and Euros enter and the local moneyed elite move colse to their liquidity, but not necessarily into efficient investments. The interest rate on bank issued Certificates of Deposits has fallen in the last nine months to an mean of 2.5% so this is not where capital is flowing. Both underground and state banks here carry their accounts in dollars and banking assets have fallen as the devaluation is recorded as operating losses. However, this does not mean that banks and other financial entities are not in receipt of these dollars. Data is just not publicly available to conclude where the dollars are coming from and where they land-- or how much money is entering and being laundered from illicit activities.
In reading what diminutive is available on the Costa Rican exchange rate there are some innuendos that the wealthy friends of Central Bank officials and the Pln hierarchy are scheming to enrich themselves straight through currency speculation. It is precisely the case that Pln personalities have a cozy connection with the moneyed interests; this became very clear in the great deliberate upon over Cafta. However, I have found no evidence to lend these assertions any credibility. After all, Costa Rica has indicted three previous presidents for graft, so it is difficult to believe that corruption on this scale could be involved. Rather, it is the ideological blindness of official thinking that is the problem.
It is foremost to keep in mind the touch of Argentina in 2001-2003. That country experienced a perfect economic collapse due in good part to pegging the peso to the dollar so that the peso was overvalued by a wide margin. Dollarizing meant surrendering operate over monetary and fiscal policy. Then to make matters worse efficient state firm were privatized at business agreement prices to local and foreign capital. State policies allowed a great inflow of foreign loans and speculative capital. Argentina under the left of town Kirchner government recovered in subsequent years by devaluing the peso, defaulting on foreign debt, ending speculation, renouncing the neo-liberal policies that created the disaster and reorienting its monetary and fiscal procedure toward national development.
The overvaluation of the colon is a direct consequence of the procedure of the Central Bank. According to the President of the Central Bank where the colon falls within the band is a definite function of the number of dollars as versus the number of colons in circulation. More dollars exchanged on the Monex, the money market for the large players, and at the state and underground banks, means a fall in the value of the dollar.
I suppose such narrow criteria for establishing the exchange rate is to be thinkable, from Costa Rican economists with a U.S. Instruction and firm administration graduates of Harvard, Wharton or other bastion of monetary orthodoxy. They are fully indoctrinated in the conventional wisdom of neo-liberalism. Two of key elements of this narrow thinking are that the purpose of monetary procedure is to operate inflation and that state advice of the economy is contrary to the economic ideas of free enterprise.
Central Bank officials have stated that the elimination of the mini-devaluations and adopting the ideas of bands was to have better operate of inflation, moderate the trend toward dollarization, and to avoid Central Bank injection of dollars to safe the exchange rate, causing Central Bank deficits. Actually, the mini-devaluations worked reasonably well. For businesses the rate was predictable and it facilitated the export development strategy adopted since the 1980s. The rate was adjusted on the value of dollars and other traded currencies in relation to domestic inflation, although the spread between inflation and devaluation in most years meant an appreciation of the colon. Contrary to Central Bank spurious rationales, Costa Rica's high rates of inflation, as well as the partial dollarization of the economy, have been consequences of its export-led integration into the global economy and precisely not to exchange rate policies. The current 4% rate of inflation, down from duplicate digit levels previously, is a consequence of the slow economy, precisely not an overvalued colon.
One of the more absurd pronouncements by international firm publications espousing the doctrines of monetarism and globalization is that every country should peg its exchange rate for dollars to the price of a McDonalds hamburger in the United States. Well, today a Big Mac in Costa Rica is about the same price as in the U.S. In this wisdom, it does not matter that the cost of labor that serves up the burger in a local franchise is 1/5 the cost in the U.S., or that the cost of constructing a fast food joint is 1/5 that in the U.S., or that buns and meat are lower priced, or that commercial land to locate a franchise is cheaper.
The McDonalds idea has more relevance if it is reversed. An spellbinding exchange rate procedure would at least in part value the cost of the factors of production-- labor, materials, and capital--in the national economy in relation to the values in the economies of trading partners. If these were the criteria than a Big Mac in the United States would cost the equivalent of $.60 in colons. This price would have the added virtue of making the Big Mac affordable for the low-waged Costa Rican servers who dish out the burger. It would also help the deteriorating acceptable of living of ordinary Costa Ricans if the government development strategy would provide incentives for domestic production of food staples like rice and beans, also helping to keep famers on the land and out of the urban slums, instead of removing tariffs on the import of foreign foodstuffs.
Certainly controlling inflation and adjusting disequilibrium's in the provide of currencies need be factors in monetary policy. But the critical goals of the policies of the Central Bank should be those of development of the national economy. This is closed by fiscal policies that allocate resources into chosen sectors vital to economic and public development and monetary policies that keep the development goals established. The current and past political administrations in Costa Rica, blinded by their neo-liberal ideology, have no idea how to go about this.
An undervalued national currency is better than an overvalued currency, at least in relation to export booms. Possibly Costa Rica should look closer at the example of China. The United States charges that China undervalues the Yuan to the detriment of the U.S. economy by the flood of cheap Chinese imports. While this is no doubt overstated, it is true that China carefully controls its currency exchange to promote its own economic development. Of course, this is not the main factor in China's unparalleled success story. China rather turned Marx on his head; socialism laid the groundwork for a transition to a raw but vital capitalism. Not the neo-liberal global capitalism of the West, but a capitalism that utilizes the socialist tradition of strong state institutions that centrally plan the public and economic development of the nation.
Establishing an exchange rate that makes economic sense is just a first step for national development. Costa Rica would do well to develop its state institutions and define development goals, not by emulating China, but by leaving aside the dogmas of monetarism and neo-liberalism and replacing the Central Bank personnel with figures that look to Costa Rica's strong tradition of public democracy and public justice and to its South American neighbors who have learned their sad lessons from 20 plus years of globalization orthodoxy and taken new, progressive directions.
China's export-led development has meant that tens of millions of peasants are displaced to barracks in the commercial centers, work for a pittance and live in the most unjust of public conditions, while the bureaucrats and businessmen fetch thinkable, wealth. On a lesser scale than China, growing inequality and public injustice are prime features of Costa Rican society. And this is mainly a supervene of the export-led development strategy, the abandonment of programs of genuine national development, such as food sovereignty, the permissive attitude toward firm regulation and firm action while strong arming labor unions, the lack of efficient ameliorative programs for the increasing problems of public inequality, and now the privatization of the very state enterprises that once formed the economic basis of Costa Rica's public democracy. It is time for real change.
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