155 Countries Still Lock Their Exchange Rate to Someone Else's Currency
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Most major currencies float. A smaller but economically weighty set does not. The IMF's Annual Report on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Rate Restrictions (AREAER) 2023, updated through September 2026, classifies every jurisdiction's de facto exchange-rate regime — not what the central bank says on its website, but what the spot rate actually did over the past six months.
This dashboard maps that universe in two views and one table: Map 1 colors each country by anchor currency (USD, EUR, GBP, basket, or other); Map 2 colors by IMF de facto class (no separate legal tender, currency board, conventional peg, crawl-like, stabilized arrangement, other managed). The table below lists all 155 rows with parity, flexibility rule, years on the peg, five-year realized volatility versus the anchor, and current status.
Why pegs still matter in 2026
Exchange-rate pegs are not museum pieces. They determine whether a Gulf petrostate imports the Fed's rate path, whether a Caribbean island can defend 2.70 East Caribbean dollars per U.S. dollar through a debt restructuring, and whether a Hong Kong dollar convertibility undertaking triggers when capital flows reverse.
The impossible trinity still binds: a country cannot simultaneously maintain (1) a fixed exchange rate, (2) an independent monetary policy, and (3) open capital markets. Hard and conventional pegs with open or partially open capital accounts therefore import the anchor's interest-rate path. That is why GCC policy rates track the Fed and why Danmarks Nationalbank sets rates versus the ECB — Denmark has not used FX intervention since December 2022, holding the krone with rates alone.
Map 1: USD still dominates the anchor ledger
Color the world by what each jurisdiction locks to, and blue (USD) covers the largest land and population mass among pegged economies:
- Gulf Cooperation CouncilSaudi Arabia (3.75 SAR/USD since 1986), UAE (3.6725), Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Jordan; Kuwait uses an undisclosed dollar-heavy basket with a daily fix.
- Dollarization and currency boardsEcuador, El Salvador, Panama (since 1904), Timor-Leste, Kosovo, Montenegro (euroized without ECB membership), Marshall Islands / Micronesia / Palau under the Compact of Free Association.
- Currency boards with legal convertibilityHong Kong (7.75–7.85 band; convertibility undertakings triggered May–August 2025), Djibouti (177.721 DJF/USD), Bosnia (1.95583 BAM/EUR board), Brunei–Singapore interchangeability at par.
- East Caribbean quasi-boardeight ECCU members at 2.70 XCD/USD; statutory FX cover ≥60%, actual backing ~99% in 2026.
Cyan (EUR/DKK) covers the CFA franc zones (655.957 XOF/XAF per euro — 81 years in the franc zone), CFP franc territories (119.3317 XPF/EUR), Denmark's ERM II (7.46038 DKK/EUR, the only remaining ERM II member), Cabo Verde, Comoros, and Bosnia's euro board.
Map 2: IMF classes are finer-grained than "peg"
The IMF's de facto taxonomy distinguishes arrangements that look similar in headlines:
| IMF class | What it means | Examples in this dataset |
|---|---|---|
| No separate legal tender | No national FX rate | Ecuador, Panama, Kosovo, Liechtenstein (CHF) |
| Currency board | Convertibility rule + passive central bank | Hong Kong, Djibouti, ECCU, Bosnia |
| Conventional peg | Published parity or narrow band | GCC, CFA, Denmark ERM II, Bahamas 2.00 |
| Stabilized arrangement | Rate inside 2% band for six months, no published peg | Guyana, Honduras, Lebanon (post-crash), Ukraine (wartime) |
| Crawl-like | Pre-announced or de facto sloping path | China (CFETS basket + 2% USD band), India (since Nov 2024 Article IV), Algeria, Vietnam |
| Other managed | Residual; often dual-rate | Iran, Cuba, Haiti, South Sudan |
Stressed pegs (red ring on Map 2) include Lebanon (official 89,500 LBP/USD after the 1,507 peg collapsed), Iraq (~18% Baghdad cash premium over the 1,310 bank sell rate), Libya (SDR peg with a large parallel premium), and Maldives (rufiyaa at the weak edge of its ±20% band).
Dual / parallel rates (yellow country outline) mark jurisdictions where the official window is not where most transactions clear — Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Turkmenistan, Eritrea, and others.
Five-year realized volatility: tight vs fiction
For hard and conventional single-currency pegs with clean data, five-year annualized volatility versus the listed anchor (Yahoo daily, Sep 2021–Sep 2026) clusters near zero:
- Bermuda, Brunei, CMA members (Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini), Bhutan0% (legal 1:1 or dollarization; `vq: z`).
- UAE0.17%; Hong Kong — 0.73% inside a 1.3% convertibility band (the noisy board on purpose).
- Denmark0.36% versus EUR despite a ±2.25% official ERM II band.
At the other extreme, Lebanon prints 210% realized vol, Bolivia 17.2% as it exited the 6.96 peg in June 2026, and Ukraine 11.3% under wartime management. A published peg with double-digit vol is usually a label, not a market.
Recent exits and entries (2024–2026)
The table flags regime changes that AREAER labels alone miss:
- Bulgarialev board at 1.95583 ended 1 January 2026 when Bulgaria joined the euro area (status: Exited → euro-area float).
- Curaçao / Sint MaartenNetherlands Antillean guilder replaced by Caribbean guilder (XCG) on 31 March 2025 at the same 1.79 USD peg.
- Boliviaofficial 6.96 BOB/USD abandoned 26–29 June 2026; daily TCO from weighted bank trades (~12.1–12.3 by August 2026).
- Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopiaspent 2023–24 closing parallel gaps by floating (not in the live peg count).
- Iraqcorrespondent-bank FX normalisation from January 2025; still dual-rate at end-Aug 2026.
How to read the table
Each row is one jurisdiction (sovereign or territory). "How it's run" in the source canvas maps to the Notes column here — the dealing window, legal rule, or administrative allocation that actually implements the peg. Status = Intact, Stressed (parallel market or recent break), Exited (peg abandoned or euro joined), or Floating union (euro-area member with no national rate).
Filter by anchor, peg kind, status, or region; sort any column. This is not a list of every managed float on earth — pure floaters (USD, JPY, GBP, AUD, BRL, MXN as independent policies) are gray on the map. Switzerland appears only as a 2015 exit from the EUR floor, not a current peg.
Methodology
Classification: IMF AREAER 2023 de facto exchange-rate arrangements, updated with IMF Article IV staff reports and central-bank primary sources through 2 September 2026 (HKMA, ECB/BNB, SNB, CBI, ECCB, CBCS, Banque de France).
Five-year volatility: Annualized standard deviation of daily log returns versus the listed anchor currency, Yahoo Finance daily closes, September 2021 – September 2026, 252 trading days. `vq: c` = clean series; `n` = robust after dropping |daily move| > 0.5%; `z` = legal 1:1 / dollarization (reported 0%); `x` = missing or peg-broken.
Map geometry: Equal Earth–style simplified country paths reused from the upstream research canvas; tiny island territories render as labeled dots.
What this is not: A trading signal, a real-time FX feed, or a complete catalog of capital controls. WAEMU's planned eco successor to the CFA franc remains delayed; the 655.957 euro peg is what is live today.