After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...

Announcing a quantitative objective for price developments has become a common practice in modern monetary policy making. While the specific features of such announced objectives vary across countries, a common rationale for this is to help anchoring inflation expectations. We use survey data on...

Starting in the mid 1980s, the level and volatility of inflation decreased across industrial countries. The inflation stabilization can be explained by a shift in monetary policy or by a lucky period of low volatility in business cycle shocks. To test the "good luck hypothesis", we examine the...

This paper investigates the determinants of countries' choice of monetary policy frameworks (MPF) for emerging and developing countries. Countries make different MPF choices and we think it is because they have different country-level characteristics (e.g. democratic strength and trade...

An increasing number of countries have adopted inflation targeting since New Zealand first adopted this framework in early 1990. Currently there are 21 countries using inflation targeting in every continent of the world. This paper discusses the characteristics of these countries and how the...

This paper discusses how price stability can be defined and how price stability can be maintained in practice. Some lessons for the Eurosystem are also considered. With regard to defining price stability, the choice between price-level stability and low (including zero) inflation and the...

The use of explicit inflation targets has meant that monetary policy has become more transparent and also easier to evaluate. The analysis in this paper is based on forecasts by Sveriges Riksbank (the central bank of Sweden) on real output and inflation. Our purpose is to separate the effects on...

Using a small empirical model of inflation, output, and money estimated on U.S. data, we compare the relative performance of monetary targeting and inflation targeting. The results show that monetary targeting would be quite inefficient, with both higher inflation and output variability. This is...

Emerging economies with inflation targets (IT) face a dilemma between fulflling the theoretical conditions of "strict IT", which implies a fully flexible exchange rate, or applying a "flexible IT", which entails a de facto managed floating exchange rate with forex interventions to moderate...