Ito-McCauley Database of Individual Central Bank Reserve Holdings

Hiro Ito and Robert McCauley compiled a The dataset(mentioned first in this 2019 worksheet) of the composition of international reserves in the period 1999-2021. This dataset was used in Ito and McCauley (2020), Chinn, Ito and McCauley (2022), and Chinn, Ito and Frankel (2024).

The IMF A BREAK it presents only the sum of the shares. Some data sets of individual central bank reserves are incomplete, and/or report absolute rather than net amounts (Iancu, et al. 2020).

At each major bank, the differences can be dramatic. Figure 13 for Riksbank of Sweden is based on Iancu et al. (2020) data, Figure 14 is based on Ito and McCauley (2022) data.

In summary, there are differences between the relevant data sets. The first figure is for USD shares, the second is for EUR shares.

Figure 1: USD shares of international reserves from IMF COFER (green), Iancu et al. (red), and Ito and McCauley (blue).

Figure 2: EUR shares of international reserves from IMF COFER (green), Iancu et al. (red), and Ito and McCauley (blue).

The differences are due to coverage (COFER covers in principle all reporting members of the IMF, while Iancu et al. and Ito-McCauley cover different sets of countries), and reserve management.

We used this data set to investigate whether dollarization is occurring in the BRICS.

Figure 3: Share of foreign currency in USD, by central bank. Source: Ito-McCauley database,.

Hiro Ito also looked ahead to non-traditional reserves until 2022:

Figure 4: The geometric mean of reserves (expressed in USD) of central banks’ reporting. Very incomplete data for 2022. Source: Ito statistics from an unpublished version of the Ito-McCauley data set.

The dataset website is here (available in Excel or Stata format). Unfortunately, coverage in this publicly available data set is smaller (63 countries) than that used in Chinn-Ito-McCauley (73 countries) or Chinn-Ito-Frankel (2024), due to privacy restrictions imposed by several central banks. -Latin America. .

Recently, Laser, Milhailov and Weidner (2024) distributed a database of central bank funds for eight currencies. I suspect that the inclusion of reserve currencies such as CAD, AUD and CNY will be spotty (and seen across all currencies in 2022 and especially 2023), given what information we have in the Ito-McCauley dataset.


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