TY - JOUR AU - Klein,Michael W. TI - Dollarization and Trade JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 8879 PY - 2002 Y2 - April 2002 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8879 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8879.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Michael W. Klein Fletcher School Tufts University Medford, MA 02155 Tel: (617) 627-2718 Fax: (617) 627-3712 E-Mail: michael.klein@tufts.edu AB - Dollarization has been suggested as a policy that might, among other goals, promote trade between a country adopting the dollar and the United States. Evidence supporting this conjecture could be drawn from a recent series of papers by Rose and co-authors who show that a currency union increases bilateral trade among its members, and that this effect is both large and statistically significant. In this paper we show that this result is not robust if we consider bilateral United States trade (even though the United States accounts for 60 percent of all observations of currency unions between industrial and non-industrial countries), nor if we consider bilateral trade of countries that have adopted the United States dollar, like Panama. Furthermore, the effect of dollarization on trade with the United States is not statistically distinct from the effect of a fixed dollar exchange rate on trade with the United States. ER -