The Great China Currency Debate: For workers or speculators? Andrew M. Fischer

The mainstream view in the West has long held that the renminbi is undervalued, and has been advocating a revaluation of the currency. Their insistence that currency appreciation should happen through nominal revaluation, rather than only through real appreciation, is best understood as reflective of speculative interests and detrimental to the developmental interests of China given that it would forfeit the country’s ability to appreciate through gradually rising wages, contrary to the claims of those leading the debate in the West.

Debate (Download the full text in PDF format)

(Note: This is also a G24 policy brief)