This book includes 21 case studies of technical assistance provided by the IMF's former Monetary and Financial Systems Department during 2003-06. These studies cover issues related to monetary policy and operations, financial markets, payment systems, and financial regulation and supervision,...

This paper reviews key areas of central banking reform in a sample of centrally planned economies undergoing transition to market-based systems. The discussion draws mainly on the experiences of four countries, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and China. Significant efforts have been made, or...

This technical note on Transparency of Monetary Policy on the Republic of Belarus highlights the open process for formulating and reporting of monetary policy discussions. The National Bank of the Republic of Belarus (NBRB) displays a satisfactory degree of transparency in formulation and...

Open market operations are the major instruments of monetary control in industrial countries and are becoming important in developing countriesand countries in transition. This paper shows how open market operationsare related to other monetary instruments, discusses the role of the market and...

This technical note examines Cyprus’s factual update on the Basel Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision for Cyprus. The 2006 directive on corporate governance provides that each commercial credit institution should have a robust internal governance framework. Although the level of...

A central bank must decide on the frequency with which it will conduct open market operations and the variability in short-term money market that it will allow. It is shown how the optimal operating procedure balances the value of attaining an immediate target and broadcasting the central...

This study takes stock of the institutional reform of monetary policy in Latin America since the early 1990s. It argues that strengthening the legal independence of central banks, together with macroeconomic policies, was instrumental in reducing inflation from three-digit annual rates in the...

Market reaction to a change in official interest rates will depend on the extent to which the change is anticipated, and on how it is interpreted as a signal of future policy. In this paper, a technique is developed to separate the anticipated and unanticipated components of such changes and is...

This paper discusses the central banking, monetary, and banking laws for 17 countries in Europe, an area where many of the techniques that are now universally used in regulating or controlling the supply of money and credit were developed. The complete text of the basic central bank law of each...