This paper develops a public education scheme that takes uncertainty aspects of private educational investments explicitly into account. In the author’s framework, the social merits of public education schemes are related to the lack of markets in which students can insure against educational...

This Selected Issues paper for Indonesia uses a small structural macroeconomics model of the Indonesian economy to analyze the inflation outlook and monetary policy challenges. The Bank of Indonesia (BI) introduced its Inflation Targeting Framework in July 2005 with the goal to reduce inflation...

This Selected Issues paper for the Republic of Korea focuses on the role of monetary policy in the current context of slowing growth and rising inflation pressures. Korea has not remained immune to the global slowdown, and with the cycle turning downward, the trade-off between inflation and...

This Selected Issues paper discusses Romania’s modeling monetary policy. A simple Forecasting and Policy Analysis System (FPAS) for Romania has been designed to help in the preparation of the IMF staff’s forecasts and policy assessments. A major advantage of this approach is that...

Inflation followed a strikingly uniform pattern in all countries of the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia during the period 1996-2009, falling until about 2000 and then rising. International fuel prices do not help explain this pattern. This conclusion is robust even when different...

To estimate the New Keynesian model, we use four key macroeconomic series for Thailand. The priors are chosen to reflect general considerations of the appropriate model dynamics and our judgment about the Thai economy. The model is solved initially so that the baseline forecast replicates staff...