Inflation targeting can be broadly defined as a framework for the conduct of MONETARY POLICY in which the central bank guides its instruments in order to hold inflation near a preannounced target or to bring back to the target. Although understanding the framework is straightfoward, its practical ...

Open economies, particularly emerging markets and commodityintensive economies, deal with large external shocks. These are typically of a financial nature in the case of the former and real—in that they affect the terms of trade—in the case of the latter. Alternative policy reactions and policy setups ...

Well before the Great Recession of 2009 put fiscal policy debates in the front burner commodity-exporting countries had to deal with important fiscal policy dilemmas stemming from revenue volatility and eventual depletion. Chilean policymakers have been at the forefront in this area since adopting a ...

Globalization has changed the way countries interact along several dimensions. Financial integration and its underpinnings are probably among the most important. Although cross-border capital flows and external debt have been closely monitored, until recently little was known about the stocks of foreign ...

Automatic price adjustment mechanisms, or indexation, have arisen in a variety of economies with distinct macroeconomic environments and in different moments in time. Examples include the labor market indexation implemented in various European countries in the postwar era, the indexation of financial ...

Economic analysts were surprised by the collapse of the Thai baht in July 1997. In the months that followed, most of the so-called East Asian Tigers faced severe balance-of-payments crises, and a year later, in August 1998, the Russian ruble was devalued. As a result of this succession of crises, the ...

Policymarkers and the academic community have reached an increasing consensus during the last two decades: the primary objective of monetary policy should be to control inflation (see, for example, King, 1999). A less settled issue is the appropriate role of the central bank regarding other, secondary ...

Central banks resort to a variety of alternative arrangements in formulating, conducting, and communicating monetary policy. One increasingly popular type of arrangement is based on a target range for inflation. In this setup the conduct of monetary policy is oriented to keeping inflation withing ...