Stats › Currencies and commodities › Currency pegs
Pegs, floats and everything between
Everybody knows the dollar floats and the Hong Kong dollar doesn't. Almost nobody knows that the IMF sorts all 193 jurisdictions it covers into ten categories, publishes the counts every year, and that the largest single category is not floating.
This page is those counts, the mechanics of four specific arrangements that are worth understanding properly, and then the uncomfortable part: a list of pegs that broke, with dates. Because a peg is a promise, and promises get tested.
One thing I want to be upfront about before you read any further. The most recent IMF classification I could actually open in this session is dated 30 April 2021. The newer editions sit behind the IMF's eLibrary and returned an access error every way I tried. So the counts below are five years old, and I am telling you that rather than dressing up an older number as current.
The IMF's 72nd AREAER, classifying 193 jurisdictions as at 30 Apr 2021, found 25 hard pegs (13.0%), 92 soft pegs (47.7%), 64 floating (33.2%) and 12 other managed (6.2%). So roughly six in ten currencies are pegged or managed in some way, not floating. Hong Kong's link has run at 7.80 since 17 Oct 1983 with convertibility undertakings at 7.75 and 7.85 since 18 May 2005. Denmark's krone sits at a central rate of 746.038 per 100 euro inside a self imposed ±2.25% band, unchanged against the D-mark and then the euro since January 1987. The CFA franc has been fixed at 655.957 to the euro since 1999, after a 50% devaluation in January 1994. And the IMF's own crisis database counts 236 currency crises between 1970 and 2017.
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Below this point there are 9 sections, 1 chart, 2 tables and 9 named sources, roughly 2650 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.