Brazil has had a long period of high inflation. It peaked around 100 percent per year in 1964, decreased until the first oil shock (1973), but accelerated again afterward, reaching levels above 100 percent on average between 1980 and 1994. This last period coincided with severe balance of...

After the economic reforms that followed the National Revolution of the 1950s, Bolivia seemed positioned for sustained growth. Indeed, it achieved unprecedented growth from 1960 to 1977. The rapid accumulation of debt due to persistent deficits and a fixed exchange rate policy during the 1970s...

The creation of the euro and the European Central Bank is a remarkable and unprecedented event in economic and political history: creating a supranational central bank and leaving eleven countries without national currencies of their own. The experience of the first year confirms that one size...

Borrowing from the experience of environmental markets, this paper proposes a system of tradable deficit permits as an efficient mechanism for implementing fiscal constraints in the European Monetary Union: having chosen an aggregate target for the Union and an initial distribution of permits,...

In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU's monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...

Available studies on asymmetries in the monetary transmission mechanism within Europe are invariably based on macro-economic evidence: such evidence is abundant but often contradictory. This paper takes a different route by using micro-economic data. We use the information contained in the...

The paper discusses the choice between inflation targeting and monetary targeting as a strategy for the Eurosystem, the actual strategy the Eurosystem announced in the fall of 1998, the framework for policy decisions appropriate for achieving the goals of the Eurosystem, the role of exchange...

Among the many challenges facing the new Eurosystem is the possibility that the regions of the euro area will respond differently to interest rate changes. In this essay, I provide evidence that differences in financial structure are the proximate cause for these national asymmetries in the...

In a previous analysis of the West African Monetary Union, Macedo(1985a), size is taken to be a major structural characteristic of a country in the sense that large countries are not affected by disturbances originating in small countries but small countries are affected by large countries'...

This paper illustrates the importance of the fiscal framework for monetary analysis by discussing three separate issues. I begin by examining how the fiscal framework changes the macroeconomic equilibrium associated with different steady state rates of money growth. This includes a summary of...