Etude du choix du régime de change dans le contexte mondial : cas des pays du Maghreb

Since the disappearance of the Breton-Woods fixed exchange rate regime, almost 30 years ago, the problematic of setting-up a viable exchange rate regime in developing countries has become more and more complex and so different choices were given to those countries. This was due, to the divergence of de facto and de jure exchange rate regimes, but more than that, even if the exchange rate regime is identified, choosing the best one remains a controversial option. In fact, as the new context is characterized by the strong mobility of capitals, many economists and governments assert that only the corners regimes are viable (absolute fixity or flexibility). But, the world is not going the way described by the supporters of the corners regimes, and thus looking for other exchange rate regimes, and for a real exchange rate standard which takes into account the position of economy in a universal space, is still an up-to-date question. In order to palliate this debate on exchange rate regimes raised up in the literature, we took an interest in the case of Maghreb countries. These countries are wondering since the beginning of the 1990's about the exchange rate regime (because of the European proposition of establishing the free exchange area and the effective starting of the euro). And so, we approached the problem of the exchange rate strategy, using two point of vues : first, structural, to get a real exchange rate standard and see its effects on economic development, second we adopted a conjuncture method to determine the best exchange rate regime for such countries which economies suffer from internal and external shocks. The structural analysis has shown a real under-valuation in comparison to purchasing power parity and even to the Balassa effect, which used to be beneficial for the development of such economies. In order to complete this structural study, we have set up empirical works on the economical sources of fluctuation in the three Maghreb counties : Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia using the Vectorial Auto-regression methodology and distinguishing between the internal and the external shocks. We aim to see the influence of these shocks on the key macro-economic variables in these countries (the level of costs, the real exchange rate and the gross national product) and subsequently deduce the more adequate exchange rate regime. The analysis of the response functions to shocks and the variance decompositions of the forecast error, during the selected period of research, induce different choice of exchange rate regime for the Maghreb countries but the reasons of that choice differ for the countries examined.