Living Around the Bloc: Lessons from Canada for Small Countries

Abstract

The paper examines the range of currency and exchange rate regimes choices facing small countries living next to large currency blocs, such as the euro area and the United States. It draws on Canada's successful experience in the 1990s with a flexible exchange rate and explicit inflation targets to argue that such a monetary rule may be the appropriate policy alternative for small countries in this situation such as the United Kingdom or Norway, that are unwilling to surrender their national currency or their monetary independence for economic or political reasons. Because the Canadian economy is more dependent on the production of natural resource products than the economy of its major trading partner, the United States, Canada's flexible exchange rate plays a valuable role in helping to stabilise the Canadian economy in the face of global shocks to natural resource prices.