High instability and low growth characterize the macroeconomic performance of most developing countries. Inadequate policies are often to blame. This paper documents the empirical regularities that characterize the relationship between macroeconomic-financial policies, instability, and growth...

This paper presents new sector saving series for Chile. The annual series for 1960-1997 are disaggregated by six sectors: external sector, general government, public enterprises, central banks, private firms, and households. Household saving is disaggregated into mandatory pension saving and...

Saving rates display considerable variation across countries and over time. This paper investigates the factors behind these broad saving disparities using a large cross-country time-series data set constructed for the World Bank Saving project. The paper assesses empirically the policy and...

New empirical evidence with regards to the effectiveness and efficiency of Chile’s capital controls is provided here, based on more and better data on the range of controls and a broad assessment of their costs and benefits. The paper concludes that capital controls have been partially...

Central banks must make policy decisions in the face of uncertainty based on imperfect and evolving knowledge about the economy. While few general results have emerged from the research on monetary policy in the face of uncertainty and learning, a key lesson is that neither uncertainty nor...

In this paper selective issues of long-run sustainability of monetary unions are analyzed. Using theoretical insights and the experience of EMU up to now we argue that empirical evidence on OCA criteria for EMU suggests that benefits for the countries participating in EMU outweigh costs by a...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a decomposition of economic growth in Chile, based on the contribution of capital, labor, and total factor productivity (TFP) and to study the determinants of TFP behavior in Chile since 1960 to date. Our results indicate that the contribution of TFP to...

Chile put into place broad free trade agreements (FTAs) with its two major trading partners: the EU (effective 2003) and the US (effective 2004). This paper quantifies their economic effects for the Chilean economy, stemming from the conventional trade components (lower tariffs and higher market...

Strong swings in business cycle conditions in industrial and emerging market economies (EMEs) alike have renewed the debate on effectiveness of stabilization policies. Traditionally it has been argued that EMEs are unable to pursue counter-cyclical monetary and fiscal policies due to financial...

Tolerating some volatility in the rate of inflation leads the design of inflation target characteristics—in inflation-targeting economies—to reflect flexibility in four dimensions, namely: the price index that defines the target, the width of the target range, the midpoint of the monetary...