Since end-2001, the Government of Afghanistan (GoA) has focused on crisis management, establishing or rebuilding fundamental institutions and basic government services, and maintaining economic stability with the help of the international community. The authorities have made significant strides...

Specific ideas about the Fisher relation between real and nominal interest rates and more general ideas about the nature of the central bank's duty to support the financial system in times of crisis were important to the Monetarist re-assessment of the causes of the Great Depression and what...

The Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek developed a unique theory of the business cycle. In their view, an unsustainable boom ensues when the rate of interest prevailing in the market falls below the natural rate. The boom is characterized not only by an increase in...

This paper addresses the question of whether and how monetary policy ease may lead to excesses in financial and real asset markets and ultimately result in financial dislocation. It presents evidence suggesting that periods when short-term interest rates have been persistently and significantly...

This paper presents a brief description of the operation of Brazil's Inflation Targeting regime, and an evaluation of its performance since its introduction in June 1999 until 2006.The performance of the regime is evaluated comparing the observed inflation values with the officially announced...

This paper examines the nature and the length of economic adjustments to selected structural reforms, drawing on a variety of approaches: descriptive analysis and simulations using Dynamic General Equilibrium and macro-economic neo-Keynesian models. The descriptive analysis suggests that the...

The paper is concerned with the economic theory of Milton Friedman. First part outlines the life of Milton Friedman. Second part examines his economic theory – “Essays in Positive Economics” (1953), “Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money“ (1956), „A Theory of the Consumption...

I consider some of the leading arguments for assigning an important role to tracking the growth of monetary aggregates when making decisions about monetary policy. First, I consider whether ignoring money means returning to the conceptual framework that allowed the high inflation of the 1970s....