This book is an up-to-date, authoritative and comprehensive analysis of the key issues and challenges facing regional currency area projects in the context of financial globalization. The authors focus on several central issues that emerged during the experiences of the 1990s and 2000s: exchange...

This paper describes some experiments with the construction of relatively simple indices which summarise in a systematic and objective way information about emerging economies currently under pressure in financial markets and those vulnerable to such pressure in the future. A survey of the...

The paper studies the role of real exchange rates and exchange rate policies in explaining differences in the economic performance in the CFA franc countries, with their fixed exchange rate regime, and another group of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with more flexible arrangements....

This paper estimates the Balassa-Samuelson effects for 11 countries in central and eastern Europe on a disaggregated set of quarterly data covering the period from the mid-1990s to the first quarter of 2008. The Balassa-Samuelson effects are clearly present and explain around 24% of inflation...

The paper reviews the recent conduct of monetary policy and central banks' interest rate setting behaviour in emerging market economies. Using a standard open economy reaction function, we test whether central banks in emerging economies react to changes in inflation, output gaps and the...

A considerable amount of theoretical literature suggests that, contrary to the predictions of textbook analysis, exchange rate devaluations may be contractionary rather than expansionary. This hypothesis has also received considerable empirical support. However, prior statistical analyses of the...

This paper compares the response of inflation to changes in exchange rate competitiveness in various regions of the world. The paper first presents evidence that an empirical relationship between the rate of inflation and the level of the real exchange rate holds for a large set of countries. It...