Impacts of Intervention Incorporates with Interest Rate Policy on Taiwan's Economy in E-commerce Environment

Fully sterilized intervention, an operation that involves a pure swap of foreign and domestic assets which leaves the money supply unchanged, gained it popularity through the experience among developed countries in the early 1980s. Ideally, it provides an independent policy tool that allows monetary authorities to pursue internal and external stabilization objectives simultaneously. In this paper, we employ a vector error correction model (VECM) to examine the dynamic interactions between exchange rate condition and policy reactions by Taiwanese monetary authorities, as Taiwan is ready to join the WTO and to help businesses take full advantages of e-commerce. We found that little efforts were made to sterilize interventions in the short term after an exchange rate shock occurred. The intention of not to sterilize interventions is to alleviate the exchange rate pressure by drastically changing domestic short term interest rates to force private sectors instantaneously adjust shares between domestic and foreign assets in their portfolios where there are speculative positions. Presumably, this official effort to avoid great fluctuations of exchange rates would offer businesses more freedoms in dealing with challenges in e-commerce environment. The result also suggests that, unlike the experience in developed countries, an independent monetary policy may not always be preferred by policy markers in small open economies.