After the economic reforms that followed the National Revolution of the 1950s, Bolivia seemed positioned for sustained growth. Indeed, it achieved unprecedented growth from 1960 to 1977. The rapid accumulation of debt due to persistent deficits and a fixed exchange rate policy during the 1970s...

Brazil has had a long period of high inflation. It peaked around 100 percent per year in 1964, decreased until the first oil shock (1973), but accelerated again afterward, reaching levels above 100 percent on average between 1980 and 1994. This last period coincided with severe balance of...

The adoption of the Taylor rule is an essential element of the New Consensus on Monetary Policy, characterized by the recent acceptance, by the orthodoxy, of money stock endogeneity. In line with the reviewed literature, a reaction function of the Brazilian Central Bank (BCB) is estimated with a...

This paper shows estimates of the optimal level of foreign reserves for Brazil between the first quarter of 1998 and the same trimester of 2008, by applying the Jeanne e Ranciére (2006) framework, using different scenarios. We also estimate the fiscal costs of holding this asset, as well as the...

"This paper relaxes some key assumptions in the probabilistic approach to fiscal sustainability. First, the authors identify structural breaks over the sample period used to estimate the covariance matrix of the shocks to the debt ratios. Second, the assumption of normality of the shocks is...