Central Bank Currency Swap Access: Unequal Allocation During Financial Distress

Since the 2007–09 global financial crisis, bilateral central bank currency swaps have become a crucial element of the Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN). 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. Additional correlates include economic size, financial and trade linkages, sovereign risk, and prior swap relationships. These findings point to a selective allocation of swaps toward systemically relevant economies and suggest the need to improve the inclusiveness of the GFSN.