THE OFFICIAL FOREIGN EXCHANGE RESERVES OF CENTRAL BANKS: ADEQUACY AND ACCUMULATION CRITERIA

The study deals with determining the structure of international currency reserves of central banks in terms of adequacy and accumulation criteria. The authors argue that the exchange rate regime is not neutral to political regimes. Autocracies gravitate more toward fixed exchange rate regimes, while democracies, on the contrary, toward floating exchange rates. This is also related to the issue of central bank independence. The authors conducted a study of the evolution of metrics used to assess the adequacy of currency reserves. The features of indicators for assessing foreign exchange reserves (Reddy, Guidotti-Greenspan, ARA criteria) are determined, which focus on the issue of taking into account capital flows in determining the adequacy of reserves and their hypertrophy. The advantages of the ARA criterion are given, which are manifested in the desire of countries to accumulate foreign exchange reserves with a prudent purpose. Disagreements in the assessment of the volume and structure of foreign exchange reserves lie in the high volatility of global capital flows, which gives rise to the phenomenon of "excessive capital flows". Particular attention is paid to the problem of the theoretical approaches explaining the process of accumulation of currency reserves. In particular, evasion of structural reforms, "new" or monetary mercantilism, financial mercantilism, prudential and competitive accumulation. In Ukraine, for example, there is a demand for structural reforms, but the political time horizon limit is often an obstacle to their effective implementation. Attention is focused on the issue of independence of central banks in terms of political regimes, which is manifested in the peculiarities of the structure and accumulation of currency reserves. The originality of the article is due to the need to define new theoretical approaches to assess the adequacy of currency reserves in view of the political system that determines the regime of exchange rates and the design of institutions of macro-financial stability.