The potential financial vulnerability that can occur when private sector or government agents acquire high levels of foreign currency debt has been at the center of discussion since the financial crises that affected the countries of Southeast Asia in the late 1990s. To the extent that a mismatch is ...

Chile was one of the world’s fastest-growing economies in the 1990s. Its growth rate of 6.8 percent per year from 1990 to 2000 (inclusive) was the seventh highest in the world, and by far the highest in Latin America. Poverty was halved, and while this was overwhelmingly due to growth rather than a ...

This paper assesses the costs and benefits of active international reserve management. The first part outlines and appraises various channels through which international reserve management may enhance economic performance, focusing on two important channels: it lowers the real exchange rate volatility ...

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 ...

Monetary policy in small open economies is typically cast as a choice between an exchange rate anchor (fixed or predetermined exchange rates) and a money anchor (floating exchange rates). Under such regimes, the growth rate of the nominal anchor is set according to the desired long-run inflation rate. ...

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 ...

Does tight monetary policy stabilize the currency after a collapse?. Does the effect of high interest rates on the exchange rate depend on the condition of the banking system? The East Asian crises and other recent currency crises have put these questions at the center of economic policymaking decisions.

Fear of floating has recently come to be seen as one of the central de facto characteristics of exchange rate regimes in emerging markets, after first being identified by Calvo and Reinhart (2002). The interpretation of this phenomenon is still open to question. Does the optimal monetary regime for ...

With the end of intermediate exchange rate regimes, countries are either abandoning domestic monetary policy (by choosing super-hard pegs or relinquishing their national currencies altogether) or strengthening independent monetary policymaking (by adopting floating exchange rates, of either the clean ...