Recently, a number of Latin American countries with high inflation and various kinds of imbalances have experienced disinflation stabilisation programmes. Brasil implemented in July 1994 the Real Plan - an exchange-rate-based stabilisation experiment. This paper revisites this experience...

The author begins by asking why Brazilian policymakers opted to target the exchange rate to stabilize inflation when this strategy had already failed in Mexico. The answer: It was no longer possible to accomodate the country's high inflation rate through the pervasive use of price indexation and...

This article assesses the impacts of Brazil's exchange-based stabilization plan (Plano Real) on the country's external financial fragility and discusses alternative exchange policies to overcome the external vulnerability. An index for external financial fragility is applied to a time series of...