The political economy of currency internationalisation: the case of the RMB
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The rise of China has sparked a debate about the economic and political consequences for the global economy of the internationalisation of the renminbi. We argue that the dominant focus of this literature – primarily the external conditions and requirements for a national currency to become an international currency – misspecifies the connections between the international and domestic requirements for currency internationalisation, as well as the potential to become the dominant international reserve currency. We correct this oversight by developing an integrated theoretical framework that highlights the domestic adjustment costs which a state must accommodate before its currency can carry the weight of internationalisation. These costs constitute a critical element of an international currency’s ‘political economy’, and they force states to negotiate contentious social trade-offs among competing domestic claims on finite public resources in a sustainable manner. Our analysis suggests that the likelihood of China being able to successfully negotiate the social costs associated with running a fully internationalised currency is currently very low, precisely because this will place unacceptable pressure on groups benefiting from the economic and political status quo. This further suggests that the American dollar will remain unchallenged as the global economy’s pre-eminent international currency for the foreseeable future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".