Two recent papers (Gonçalves and Carvalho, 2009; and Brito, 2010) hold contradictory views regarding the role of inflation targeting during periods of disinflation. The first paper claims that inflation targeting reduces sacrifice ratios-i.e., the ratio of output losses to the change in trend...

In recent years, five of the main economies in Latin America -Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia and Peru- have adopted Inflation Targeting regimes. In the context of these converging monetary strategies, would the IT nations in the region be better o adopting a common currency? Would they be...

Between 1938 and 1967, including the Bretton Woods period after 1947, Colombia pegged its currency to the dollar. Although the exchange rate was fixed, the peso was devaluated more than 12% on six occasions. The devaluation episodes were complex, traumatic, highly politicized and had costly...

Why is that the achievements of some disinflations from low and moderate peaks are longlived, whereas in others the gains in the inflationary front dissipate quickly? Based on an index of the sustainability of disinflations proposed in the paper, various competing explanations of what determines...

Over the last quarter of a century, inflation targeting has become a popular monetary regime. Nevertheless, empirical evaluations of IT have shown contradictory results. Part of the reason is that IT in and of itself constitutes an endogenous decision and thus needs to be properly instrumented....

Abstract 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...