Empirical analysis reveals three regularities among middleincome countries: consumption is highly procyclical and more volatile than output, investment is highly procyclical and three to four times as volatile as output, and real net exports are countercyclical and about three times as volatile as ...

Monetary policy in South Africa's emerging market economy, given capital account liberalization and severe constraints on fiscal policy, has the major responsability for curbing inflation and currency instability while trying to ensure sufficient growth for longer-term political stability and the ...

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 ...

After marked fluctuations in the business cycle over the last fifty years, the Chilean economy now appears to be less volatile and more resilient to external shocks. Because Chile is a small and increasingly open economy, analysts have long suspected that the amplitude of the cyclical fluctuations in ...

Globalization has been under attack over the last few years. Activists, famous academics, and commentators of various stripes have mounted a systematic campaign against free trade in goods and, especially, in financial claims. One of the latest manifestations of this antiliberalization mood was the ...

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 ...

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 ...

This paper explores the implications of the vast body of studies of cross-country growth determinants for the evaluation of alternative policies. Empirical growth studies have experienced a remarkable flowering in the last fifteen years, and innumerable insights have unquestionably been uncovered ...

The role of inflationary persistence has become a recurrent theme in discussions on stabilization programs (Fischer, 1986). This has particularly been the case in recent debates on the merits of exchange-rate-based stabilization plans. Some authors claim that anti-inflationary programs based on ...

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 ...