#1458311 ANPEC - 2008 - Exame de Seleção Nacional (ANPEC)/"2009"

With capital so mobile and America's monetary policy so loose, emerging economies have no easy fix for inflation. Interest rates clearly need to be raised by a lot, but a tidal wave of capital could either boost domestic liquidity or cause currencies to become overvalued. Brazil has allowed its currency to rise by more than 100% against the dollar over the past five years. This has helped to bring inflation down (though it is now rising again), but the real is now widely thought to be overvalued, pushing the current account back into deficit.

One solution is to tighten fiscal policy, which would reduce excess demand. Rapid growth in public spending is partly to blame for the excessive growth in Brazil's domestic demand. But fiscal tightening would be hard to justify in China, which already has a budget surplus. A larger surplus would boost domestic saving and hence the country's already large current-account surplus.

Either way, emerging economies need to accept that because their productivity growth is faster than the rich world's, their real exchange rates will have to rise over time. That must mean either a rise in the nominal exchange rate or higher inflation; they cannot escape both.

According to the text, emerging economies:

Item 2: must increase their real exchange rates over time;