When inflation is chronic, firms develop indexation practices that automatically tie the growth of prices, wages, and other contracts to the performance of some comprehensive price index. The microeconomic advantages of indexation are evident and derive from the immunization of the relative price ...

In standard macroeconomics, fiscal policy involves choices about expenditures, taxes, and debt issue. The different kinds of public spending may be distinguished with respect to their interactions with private decisions. For example, some public activities influence private production and some interact ...

Four years after its outbreak, the Asian crisis continues to confound experts: a region whose countries had long been considered paragons of successful economic development is mired in financial collapse and deep recession. By contrast, Latin America -with the important exceptions of Brazil and Ecuador- ...

Controls on international capital flows have no place in a world without policy distortions and markt failures. Capital controls can only be justified as second-best measures to compensate for nonremovable policy distortions, including inadequate regulation and supervision of the financial and corporate ...

Since the implementation of the Real Plan of 1994, the Brazilian economy has been in the process of reducing its degree of indexation. For more than three decades, Brazilian wages, rents, financial securities, and other contracts were indexed to the price level. The frequency of adjustment sometimes ...

Since the mid-1970s, the macroeconomic consequences of wage indexation has been the subject of considerable research. Starting with an enthusiastic proposal for indexation by Friedman (1974) and two influential papers by Gray (1976) and Fischer (1977), the academic literature has examined the effects ...

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 ...

For a Chilean capital market participant, it may be hard to imagine a world without the indexation unit, the Unidad de Fomento (UF). Most market participants would probably agree that the UF played a central role in the creation of a local capital market and also that it has had a positive impact on ...