About the AUD/UYU rate
The AUD/UYU rate is how many UYU one Australian dollar buys. It moves constantly with interest-rate expectations, commodity prices and global risk sentiment - see what moves the rate. Tradergy shows the mid-market reference rate and does not forecast where it’s heading. For the 52-week highs and lows and a daily table, see the AUD/UYU rate history.
Where else this pair appears: the reverse rate, UYU → AUD, is on the receiving Uruguayan peso view, and sending Australian dollars to Uruguay is covered on the AUD → UYU transfer page. Every AUD pair sits on the convert hub, and to work in more than one currency at once there is the currency converter.
The second unit Uruguayans keep accounts in
Ley N° 17.761 of 12 May 2004 created the Unidad Indexada and fixed its starting value at 1.2841 pesos as at a base date of 1 August 2003. It sits alongside the peso as a unit of account: nothing is issued in it and no note carries it, so Uruguay keeps its accounts in two units and spends in one.
The mechanism is set out in the statute itself. Article 2 of the law provides that the value of the Unidad Indexada varies daily, calculated so as to accumulate the same percentage variation that the consumer price index recorded in the immediately preceding month. The Instituto Nacional de Estadística publishes the official value and its methodology. A contract written in these units therefore holds its real value automatically, without either party renegotiating anything.
Why a country builds such a thing is a question of history. The economic historian Luis Bértola, of the Universidad de la República, writing for the Economic History Association, records Uruguayan inflation running above 50 per cent a year from at least the 1960s and persisting through fiscal-deficit-driven instability into the 1980s, when a stabilisation attempt used a pre-announced schedule of exchange rate adjustments known as the tablita. Decades of that teach people not to write long contracts in the national unit.
Sources: Ley N° 17.761 of 12 May 2004 (IMPO, Centro de Información Oficial, Uruguay) · Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Unidad Indexada · Luis Bértola, An Overview of the Economic History of Uruguay since the 1870s, EH.net Encyclopedia, Economic History Association