Uganda has benefited from international reserve accumulation. The fiscal stance is tighter mainly owing to delays in execution of a large hydropower project. A suspension of budget support owing to theft of donor funds has curtailed spending plans and hurt growth prospects. The authorities have...

Robust GDP growth, declining unemployment, low and stable inflation, and a string of fiscal and current account surpluses -- it's a record to be envied. These outcomes in Canada owe much to sound macroeconomic policies, as well as to a favorable external environment. This book focuses on these...

This paper employs stochastic simulations of a small structural rational expectations model to investigate the consequences of the zero bound on nominal interest rates. We find that if the economy is subject to stochastic shocks similar in magnitude to those experienced in the U.S. over the...

Under a conventional policy rule, a central bank adjusts its policy rate linearly according to the gap between inflation and its target, and the gap between output and its potential. Under 'the opportunistic approach to disinflation' a central bank controls inflation aggressively when inflation...

This paper provides an overview of the reserve requirement measures undertaken by the Central Bank of Peru. It provides a rationale for the use of these instruments as well as empirical evidence of their effectiveness. In general, the results show that tightening reserve requirements has the...

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...

This paper takes up the issue of the flexibility of inflation targeting regimes, with the specific goal of determining whether the monetary policy of the Bank of England, which has a formal inflation target, has been any less flexible than that of the Federal Reserve, which does not have such a...

Real world monetary policy is complicated by long and variable lags in the transmission of the policy to the economy. Most of the policy models, however, abstracts from policy lags. This paper presents a model where transmission lags depend on the behaviour of a two-sector supply side of the...