Recent financial sector crises and their resolution have raised new issues and provided additional experiences to draw on in the future. Banking sector problems in Russia, Turkey, and a few Latin American countries occurred within the context of highly dollarized economies, high levels of...

This paper seeks to draw lessons from the IMF’s experience in handling financial crises around the globe over the past ten years that are relevant to the challenges faced by countries in Latin America, especially in the wake of the recent crisis in Argentina. Experience suggests that...

This paper presents an empirical investigation of inflation dynamics in Libya over the period 1964–2010, using cointegration and error correction models. While inflation inertia is found to be a key determinant of consumer price inflation, the econometric results indicate that government...

Since the start of the 2008 - 09 financial crisis, the Polish Overnight Index Average (POLONIA) has persistently been below the policy rate, suggesting a limited influence of the NBP’s open market operations on the short-term interbank rate. In this regard, this paper analyzes the...

We employ a structural panel VAR model with interaction terms to identify determinants of effective transmission from central bank policy rates to retail lending rates in a large country sample. The framework allows deriving country specific pass-through estimates broken down into the...

Do changes in monetary policy affect inflation and output in the East African Community (EAC)? We find that (i) Monetary Transmission Mechanism (MTM) tends to be generally weak when using standard statistical inferences, but somewhat strong when using non-standard inference methods; (ii) when...

Many central banks in low-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are modernising their monetary policy frameworks. Standard statistical procedures have had limited success in identifying the channels of monetary transmission in such countries. Here we take a narrative approach, following Romer...

Abstract Empirical evidence is mounting that, in advanced economies, changes in monetary policy have a more benign impact on the economy—given better anchored inflation expectations and inflation being less responsive to variation in unemployment—compared to the past. We examine another...

This paper proposes a quantitative assessment of the welfare effects arising from the Common Monetary Area (CMA) and an array of broader grouping among Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries. Model simulations suggest that (i) participating in the CMA benefits all members; (ii)...

We develop a semi-structural new-Keynesian open-economy model, with separate food and non-food inflation dynamics, for forecasting and monetary policy analysis in low-income countries and apply it to Kenya. We use the model to run several policy-relevant exercises. First, we filter international...