Exchange Rate Policy in Chile: the Abandonment of the Band and the Floating Experience

As many countries worldwide, Chile has experienced virtually all the menu of options of exchange rate policies in the last forty years—with the sole exception of giving up its national currency. The quest for a reasonable exchange rate policy has been inspired in part by the different goals that, throughout these four decades, policymakers have attempted to achieve with this policy. After almost a decade of inflation targeting coexisting with an exchange rate band, in 1999 the Central Bank of Chile gave up the band and replaced it with a policy of floating. This paper deals with two main questions: (a) Why was the band abandoned and, by the same token, why did it last so long? and (b) How has the floating regime worked so far? The latter question involves accounting for the possible appearance of “fear of floating” by macroeconomic authorities, as well as evaluating the regime in three issues highlighted by the critics of exchange rate floating: passthrough to domestic prices, exchange rate volatility and balance sheet effects.