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 ...

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 ...

In the twentieth century, Chile experienced most monetary and exchange rate regimes. Periods of fixed exchange rates usually ended in speculative attacks as a result of inconsistent policies or significant external shocks, generating serious real costs and larger exchange rate volatility.

Inflation targeting in an open economy insolves a number of complexities that do not arise with inflation targeting in a clises economy. One of these is that central banks in open economies have to decide how to repond to changes in the exchange rate.

Monetary policy design has experienced major changes over the last twenty years. These changes had their origin in changes in macroeconomic theory, a better understanding of the importance of achieving and maintaining low inflation, and the abandonment of fixed pegs in favor of floating exchange rate ...

Both policymakers and economists increasingly accept that the main medium- to long-run goal of monetary policy is the pursuit of price stability, defined as maintaining a low and stable rate of inflation. A high and variable inflation rate is socially and economically costly.

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 ...

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 ...