Saleem Bahaj and Ricardo Reis

Only a handful of currencies are regularly used for cross-border payments: the euro, the yen, the pound, the yuan and, of course, the US dollar, which dominates almost any measure of international use. But how does a currency achieve an international status in the first place? And which government policies assist in that jump-start? Economic theory and the rise of the renminbi (RMB) in the last decade offer some clues.

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