An indexed unit of account, such as the Unidad de Fomento (UF) in Chile, is a money analogue that can be used to price items for sale or to specify Amounts to be repaid in the future. While it is in a sense a sort of money, it is not true money since it is not a medium of exchange and it has no physical ...

Monetary policy in small open economies is typically cast as a choice between an exchange rate anchor (fixed or predetermined exchange rates) and a money anchor (floating exchange rates). Under such regimes, the growth rate of the nominal anchor is set according to the desired long-run inflation rate. ...

Fear of floating has recently come to be seen as one of the central de facto characteristics of exchange rate regimes in emerging markets, after first being identified by Calvo and Reinhart (2002). The interpretation of this phenomenon is still open to question. Does the optimal monetary regime for ...

With the end of intermediate exchange rate regimes, countries are either abandoning domestic monetary policy (by choosing super-hard pegs or relinquishing their national currencies altogether) or strengthening independent monetary policymaking (by adopting floating exchange rates, of either the clean ...

For decades, the exchange rate was at the center of macroeconomic policy debates in emerging markets. Many countries used the nominal exchange rate to bring down inflation, –others—mostly in Latin America—used the exchange rate to implicitly tax the export sector. Currency crises were common and usually ...

This paper assesses the costs and benefits of active international reserve management. The first part outlines and appraises various channels through which international reserve management may enhance economic performance, focusing on two important channels: it lowers the real exchange rate volatility ...

Chile was one of the world’s fastest-growing economies in the 1990s. Its growth rate of 6.8 percent per year from 1990 to 2000 (inclusive) was the seventh highest in the world, and by far the highest in Latin America. Poverty was halved, and while this was overwhelmingly due to growth rather than a ...

The question of whether capital controls should be part of the tool box for policymakers to deal with capital flows has become one of the central issues in the international economic policy debate. It was one of the key policy issues in the G20 under the French Presidency in 2011 and it has been covered ...

Chile’s exchange rate shows a strong volatility to copper price fluctuations. This correlation is essentially because copper is our main export product therefore increases in the price of copper imply higher returns from copper export volumes both for private and the stateowned mining company Codelco. ...

One of the most popular pieces of wisdom in economic policy is the idea that fiscal policy is more effective in a fixed exchange rate regime or a currency union than in a flexible exchange rate regime. In this paper we revisit the theoretical foundations of the conventional wisdom on the relative ...