In January 2000 the Swiss National Bank adopted a new monetary policy framework incorporating a price stability objective defined as (any rate of) CPI inflation below 2 percent. We contrast this framework with inflation targeting strategies and review the SNB's policy decisions since its...

In January 2000 the Swiss National Bank adopted a new monetary policy framework incorporating a price stability objective defined as (any rate of) CPI inflation below 2 percent. We contrast this framework with inflation targeting strategies and review the SNB's policy decisions since its...

In January 2000 the Swiss National Bank adopted a new monetary policy framework incorporating a price stability objective defined as (any rate of) CPI inflation below 2 percent. We contrast this framework with inflation targeting strategies and review the SNB’s policy decisions since its...

This paper examines the inflation experience of seven small economies in East Asia: Hong Kong, Malaysia, Korea, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. It documents common elements in the inflation processes across countries that are not only due to the reaction of the countries to the...

This paper argues that inflation targeting should not be defined too narrowly. The principal objective of a sound monetary policy, namely to provide a credible nominal anchor for the economy, can be achieved with a variety of institutional structures and operational frameworks. It is essential,...

This paper uses a semi-structural vector autoregression approach to estimate the relative importance of domestic and foreign shocks as sources of macroeconomic fluctuations in Hong Kong since the adoption of the currency board. We find that external factors are clearly dominant in the medium to...

This paper revisits the question whether economies in Asia are likely to be good candidates for pursuing similar exchange rate policies and ultimately joining together in a monetary union. A number of authors have investigated this question before typically using some variant of the methodology...

Interest in currency internationalisation among policy makers as well as the general public has intensified in recent years. One reason is a view that the global impact of the recent financial crisis has been intensified because of the dominant role of the US dollar in the international...