Sound policies and favorable external conditions have led to a strong economic recovery, but important challenges lie ahead. Uruguay’s near-term economic prospects are generally favorable. The main short-term challenge is rising inflation in the wake of vigorous growth and capital...

The staff report for the 2006 Article IV Consultation on Botswana highlights economic developments and monetary and exchange rate policy. Botswana’s growth has been fueled by continued increases in diamond production; and real diamond output is projected to level off, and then decline...

Indonesia’ 2008 Article IV Consultation reports that Indonesia’s growth performance remains strong despite the deteriorating global environment. The economy remains vulnerable to shifts in investor sentiment, and volatility in the government bond market has increased. The new...

In this paper, the IMF's new Global Economy Model (GEM) is used to estimate the contribution of unbalanced growth to the decline in the share of goods production in Australia and New Zealand. The simulation results suggest that faster productivity growth in the tradable goods sector in...

This report on the Russian Federation’s Article IV Consultation highlights Data Module and response by the authorities. Russia’s statistical system has made good progress in adopting international statistical methodologies in response to the need to capture in the statistics the...

Since the beginning of the 1990s, both industrialised and developing countries have adopted inflation targeting as a monetary policy strategy. Their central banks have designed their legal mandates to instutionalise monetary policy to aim only at price stability. In this sense, price stability...

This paper provides comprehensive empirical evidence that supports the predictions of Sargent and Wallace's (1981) "unpleasant monetarist arithmetic" that an increase in public debt is typically inflationary in countries with large public debt. Drawing on an extensive panel dataset, we find that...

This paper examines the current level of central bank independence (CBI) and transparency in a broad sample of countries using newly constructed measures, and looks at the evolution in both measures from an earlier time period. Increases in CBI have tended to occur in more democratic countries...

This paper focuses on monetary and exchange rate policies in Colombia, with particular emphasis on the period 1999-2002, when flotation of the peso and inflation targeting were adopted. We argue, first, in favor of adopting "operational inflation target ranges" and, second, in favor of...

Peru has successfully pursued a market-driven financial de-dollarization during the last decade. Dollarization of credit and deposit of commercial banks - across all sectors and maturities - has declined, with larger declines for commercial credit and time and saving deposits. The analysis...