Dollarization - Types

Types

Dollarization can occur in a number of situations. The most popular type of dollarization is unofficial dollarization or de facto dollarization. Unofficial dollarization happens when residents of a country choose to hold a significant share of their financial assets denominated in foreign currency although the foreign currency lacks the legal tender. They hold deposits in the foreign currency because of a bad track record of the local currency, or as a hedge against inflation of the domestic currency.

Official dollarization or full dollarization happens when a country adopts a foreign currency as its sole legal tender, and ceases to issue the domestic currency. Another effect of a country adopting a foreign currency as its own is that the country gives up all power to vary its exchange rate. There is a small number of countries adopting a foreign currency as legal tender. For example, Panama underwent a process of full dollarization by adopting the U.S. dollar as legal tender in 1904. This type of dollarization is also known as de jure dollarization.

Dollarization can be used semiofficially (or officially bimonetary systems), where the foreign currency is legal tender alongside the domestic currency.

In literature, there is a set of related definitions of dollarization such as external liability dollarization, domestic liability dollarization, banking sector's liability dollarization or namely deposit dollarization and credit dollarlization. The external liability dollarization measures total external debt (private and public) denominated in foreign currencies of the economy. Deposit dollarization can be measured as the share of dollar deposit in total deposit of the banking system while credit dollarization can be measured as the share of dollar credit in total credit of the banking system.