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 ...

From 1984 to 1998, the Chilean economy grew at a rate of 5.4 percent per capita, putting it among the world’s most successful economies in the past twenty years. This performance can undoubtedly be attributed to the market-oriented structural reforms that took place in the 1970s, 1980s, and early ...

In mid-January 1990, Brazil abandoned its crawling exchange rate band. Surprisingly enough, the country's economic performance in the aftermath of this episode was much better than expected, given the performance of other emerging market economies after a move toward floating. Despite the large ...

For the last few years, the staff of the Iternational Monetary Fund (IMF) has been engaged in assessing the functioning and effectiveness of inflation targeting in IMF member countries that have adopted this scheme as their monetary policy anchor. This involvement was restricted to the IMF's surveillance ...

After a long history of high and volatile inflation, the Central Bank of Chile began implementing its monetary policy in the early 1990s by announcing yearly targets for inflation. This new framework was the first step toward a full-fledged inflation-targeting setup, although the Central Bank continued ...

One of the most serious problems that a central bank in an emerging market economy can face is the sudden reversal of capital inflows (or sudden stops). Hoarding international reserves can be used to smooth the impact of such reversals (see, for example, Lee, 2004), but these reserves are seldom ...

Por más de un siglo, los economistas y quienes tienen a cargo la política económica han debatido las ventajas relativas a los sistemas financieros basados en el mercado bursátil con respecto a los basados en el sistema bancario. Recientemente, sin embargo, quienes han propuesto un desarrollo del sistema ...

The world’s central banks have undergone dramatic changes in the past fifteen years. Increases in independence and transparency have been coupled with a shift in focus. Price stability is now the paramount objective for the vast majority of modern central bankers. Combined, these changes in central ...

Latin America has had an active presence in international markets since independence in the early nineteenth century. Participation has been quite volatile, though. International borrowing financed the wars of independence in the early 1800s, but the boom that started in 1822 with a loan to Colombia ...

En este artículo presentamos nueva evidencia de cambios recientes en la dinámica inflacionaria en Chile. Mostramos que las rigideces de precios han aumentado, mientras el grado de indexación a la inflación pasada ha decrecido a lo largo del tiempo. También mostramos que el traspaso del tipo de cambio ...