This paper investigates the Philippine government's price stabilization policy for rice. Seemingly unrelated regressions are used to examine the effectiveness of the program at regional and national levels over a 21-year period (January 1983 to December 2003). Results of the regional analysis...

Using a political economy perspective, this paper establishes the strong relationship between rice and politics and explains recent developments in the Philippine rice landscape. Results of the analysis show that the price of rice has been a significant determinant in election results since the...

This paper reviews the historical performance of monetary policy in Nigeria and discusses the relative merits of alternative monetary policy strategies that Nigeria could adopt in the future, once the many operational issues that today obstruct the conduct of monetary policy have been addressed....

The ECB's objective of medium-term inflation below 2 percent has been portrayed by critics as ambiguous, asymmetric, and excessively stringent. This paper attempts a comprehensive evaluation of the trade-offs for the euro area and finds that: (1) in terms of guiding inflation expectations and...

Using the modern theory of public economics as the point of departure, this paper outlines a basic principle for setting taxes and/or prices of commodities based on two key criteria, efficiency and equity. The paper shows that for petroleum products, the basic principle needs modification in the...

This paper addresses the question of why inflation has not yet converged to price stability in Central America and the Dominican Republic and is currently relatively high by Latin American standards. It suggests that despite the institutional strengthening of monetary policy, important flaws...

Inflation targeting lite (ITL) countries float their exchange rate and announce an inflation target, but are not able to maintain the inflation target as the foremost policy objective. This paper identifies 19 emerging market countries as practitioners of ITL. They seem to focus mainly on...

One of the pioneers of inflation targeting (IT), the Bank of Canada is now considering a possibility of switching to price-level-path targeting (PLPT), where past deviations of inflation from the target would have to be offset in the future, bringing the price level back to a predetermined path....

The paper develops a simple model of sovereign debt where default both through direct repudiation and through inflation are possible and give rise to (endogenous) constraints on the currency composition and the level of public debt. This set up allows to show that procyclicality of fiscal policy...

Statistical measures of the volatility of exchange rates, interest rates, and stock prices are estimated for a number of countries. Periods of high volatility are identified and compared with periods of financial difficulty. The results indicate that GARCH models of volatility could be...