Central Bank Currency Swap Access: Unequal Allocation During Financial Distress

Yet, empirical evidence on the determinants of swap access remains limited in both temporal and geographic scope. This study addresses this gap by introducing a novel panel dataset covering 440 publicly documented bilateral swap agreements for 194 countries between 2007 and 2023, which distinguishes between first and renewed agreements and financial and trade-financial swap purposes.

Our pooled logit regression results indicate that positive crisis- and external-debt-related associations are concentrated among Fed and PBOC swap provisions, rather than applying uniformly across providers. At the same time, we document systematic income-group differences: during crises and with high external debt levels, low- and middle-income countries are generally less likely than high-income countries to obtain first or renewed swaps.