Many developing and developed economies consider structural reforms to trade and fiscal policy that are designed to lower taxes and tariffs and stimulate investment and production of the manufacturing sector. A good example of such a country is Chile, which went through a series of structural reforms ...

The two central issues in monetary policy are separated by time horizon. The first relates to the short run: what is the appropriate monetary policy across the business cycle? The second relates to the long run: waht is the optimal long-run rate of inflation? This paper explores these classic issues ...

A central dimension of globalization is the world trend toward larger trade and financial openness, observed in most industrial and developing economies. Openness increases the integration of world goods and capital markets, contributing to potential gains in growth and welfare. However, increased ...

Over the last twenty years, many central banks have adopted increasing standards of transparency in communicating their monetary policy objectives, in particular regarding the explicit definition and quantification of their price stability objective or inflation target. One important benefit of increased ...

There is fairly wide agreement among economists on what constitutes optimal—or at least good—product market and financial market institutions. There is much less agreement on what constitutes optimal—or at least good—labor market institutions. As a result, the public debate is too often dominated by ...

The central problem in understanding economic development and growth is not, in fact, to understand the process by which an economy raises its savings rate and increases the rate of physical capital accumulation. Many development practitioners and researchers continue to target capital accumulation ...

Determining turning points in the business cycle is a difficult problem. Making sensible predictions concerning the growth path of an economy in the medium or long term is even harder. This paper explores what can be achieved by analysing and modeling time series observations on gross domestic product ...

A component of agricultural policy in Chile is the use of price bands to stabilize domestic price movements in selected agricultural crops and processed agricultural commodities. In the 1990s, the use of price bands for wheat, fats and oils, and sugar resulted in the equivalent of roughly a 22 percent ...

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 ...

The importance of economic growth cannot be overstated. Income growth is ssential for achieving economic, social, and even political development. Countries that grow strongly and for sustained periods of time are able to reduce their poverty levels significantly, strengthen their democratic and political ...