Inflation-forecast targeting is state of the art for monetary policy. This book explores first principles, including managing short-term policy trade-offs. The book also outlines efficient operational procedures and reviews the experiences of Canada, the Czech Republic, and India. The analysis...

Inflation distorts prices, erodes savings, discourages investment,stimulates capital flight, inhibits growth, and makes economic planning anightmare. During the past decade, several advanced economies have takena new approach to the age-old problem of controlling inflation throughmonetary policy...

The paper considers the merits of rules and discretion for monetary policy when the structure of the macroeconomic model and the probability distributions of disturbances are not well defined. It is argued that when it is costly to delay policy reactions to seldom-experienced shocks until formal...

This Selected Issues paper examines whether Egypt’s current account and exchange rate are in broad equilibrium. The paper analyzes areas of fiscal spending that have the biggest saving potential in a cross-country perspective. An assessment of Egypt’s real exchange rate is presented. The...

This Selected Issues paper on the Arab Republic of Egypt examines the dynamic relationship between the nominal exchange rate and prices during Egypt’s exit from a managed exchange rate regime. The exit from the peg went through several phases, including a series of step devaluations between...

This paper reviews the first five years’ experience with inflation targeting in the United Kingdom. It concludes that inflation performance was not significantly different under inflation targeting than predicted by a VAR model estimated in the period prior to participation in the exchange...

The paper presents a DGE model designed as a core projection tool to support monetary policy in inflation-targeting (IT) emerging market economies. The paper uses a particularly simple and flexible general equilibrium model structure that can be amended to account for various phenomena that...

This paper reviews the current monetary and exchange rate policy frameworks in Armenia and Georgia, and the challenges associated with the choice of a credible nominal anchor in the context of large nominal and real shocks. The paper makes a case for a gradual transition to full-fledged...

This paper evaluates the performance of two alternative policy rules, a forward-looking rule and a spontaneous adjustment rule, under alternative inflation targets, in terms of output losses in a macroeconomic model, using European Union data. The simulations suggest that forward-looking rules...

This paper presents a model for Inflation Targeting under imperfect policy credibility. It modifies the conventional model in three ways: an endogenous policy credibility process, by which monetary policy can gain or lose credibility over time; non-linearities in the inflation equation and in the...