Currency boards have been portrayed as an extreme way of creating currency quality and improving monetary policy credibility in emerging market economies. Yet the link between currency board operations and credibility is far from obvious. Indeed, under the heading of currency boards, there is in...

Monetary policy has been one of the main pillars of the post-2001 stabilisation programme. Encouraged by its success, the central bank shifted from implicit to explicit inflation targeting in 2006 and set a medium-term inflation target of 4%, applicable from end 2007. However this objective...

The bulk of recent literature on foreign-exchange interventions has overlooked the potential interdependencies that may exist between these operations and the conduct of monetary policy. This is the case even under inflation targeting and especially in emerging-market economies, because central...

This paper examines the nature and the length of economic adjustments to selected structural reforms, drawing on a variety of approaches: descriptive analysis and simulations using Dynamic General Equilibrium and macro-economic neo-Keynesian models. The descriptive analysis suggests that the...

Over the past 25 years inflation has moderated considerably in all OECD economies. At the same time, the production of many goods and services has become increasingly internationalised and the level of trade between the OECD and non-OECD economies has risen markedly. This paper investigates the...

The oil price hit a low of around USD 10 at the end of 1999. Since then it has moved upwards in a series of steps. In recent years it has been one of the most closely monitored components of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is a leading inflation indicator. When it topped the USD 50 mark in...

Inlfation targeting is a relatively new way to administer the monetary policy, since the velocity of money revealed unstable and hard pegs unsustainable. The new regime is one of flexible exchange rates, and the target of the monetary policy becomes the rate of inflation itself, instead of any...

The empirical literature has long established that U.S. interest rates are an important driver of international portfolio flows, with lower rates “pushing” capital to emerging markets. On the basis of this literature, it is often argued that the Federal Reserve’s imminent policy tightening...

This paper aims to contribute to the meager literature on monetary policy effectiveness in Tunisia especially after the revolution of January 2011; a period during which the country entered a delicate democratization transition. On the basis of a monthly data of several macroeconomic variables...