In recent months, China has stepped up a longstanding campaign for its currency (officially called the renminbi [RMB] but also referred to as the yuan), to be included as a part of the composition of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) Special Drawing Rights (SDR). While the media is abuzz with the potential market implications of China’s currency achieving status as an international reserve currency—one which can be held by central banks and other major financial institutions to pay off international debt obligations—at one level, the issue is somewhat arcane. SDRs are a synthetic quasi-currency made up of a basket of widely traded currencies. They are used by the IMF for accounting purposes and as a medium for allocating assets among member countries. They play almost no role in private trade and finance. They do, however, provide the IMF’s approval that a currency has the qualities necessary to be an international reserve currency. Indeed, SDR currencies are automatically regarded as acceptable reserve currencies, whereas other currencies have to meet criteria for full convertibility to have the same status.
Until recently, the Chinese government placed major restrictions on the use of the RMB. The authorities appeared to consider the control that an insulated currency conferred on domestic monetary and fiscal policy to be more important than the potential benefits from full participation in global financial markets. In recent years, however, the government attitude has changed, with market-oriented economic reforms and a more outward-looking foreign policy including measures to encourage wide RMB usage.
The four currencies with SDR status—the US dollar, the euro, the UK pound sterling and the Japanese yen—currently make up the overwhelming majority of global international currency reserves. As a knock-on effect, they dominate international bond markets and global financial transactions. In recent years, the rising share of global trade accounted for by emerging markets, and by China in particular, has left this state of affairs looking somewhat anachronistic. The Chinese government had campaigned for RMB inclusion in SDRs in 2010, at the most recent of the IMF’s reviews of the SDR structure, but at that time, the bid was rejected. In our view, prospects for success at the meeting scheduled for October 2015 appear high.
The Potential Benefits for China
Reserve currency status and RMB internationalization could confer a number of significant benefits on China, including potentially lowering borrowing costs and facilitating overseas expansion by Chinese companies, allowing cross-border contracts in major commodities such as iron ore to be priced in RMB, thereby easing foreign exchange risks arising from pricing in US dollars, and above all, opening the way for a portion of China’s enormous foreign exchange reserves to be redeployed in more economically productive directions. The latter measure could conceivably stimulate economic growth at the margin both in China and on a global scale. Other reserve currency countries have much lower reserves relative to their gross domestic product than China does—the United States is able effectively to operate without reserves at present— while overseas investment projects such as China’s ambitious “one belt, one road” and “New Silk Road” initiatives to build trading infrastructure with neighboring states, as well as private initiatives, would represent potentially attractive new uses for resources that are at present tied up in currency deposits and Treasury bills.
