Devaluing to Prosperity: Misaligned Currencies and Their Growth Consequences

Experts have long questioned the effect of currency undervaluation on overall GDP growth. They have viewed the underlying basis for this policy—intervention in currency markets to keep the price of the home currency cheap—as doomed to failure on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Moreover, the view has been that overvalued currencies hurt economic growth but undervalued currencies cannot help in growth acceleration. A parallel belief has been that the real exchange rate—that is, a coun...