Exchange-rate based stabilizations, while useful in accelerating the disinflation process, typically lead to overvalued exchange rates and large current account deficits. These factors, in turn, make it difficult to sustain exchange rate pegs, placing heavy demands upon monetary policy to...

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Brazil went through a sequence of failed stabilization plans that tried to cope with an enduring hyperinflation. This paper uses a money demand model to evaluate monetary policies during those episodes. Consistency between money supply and...

Conventional monetary theory holds that a country can only possess one nominal anchor in the long run. With an open capital account, the country must decide between an exchange rate target or independent monetary policy. The latter implies inflation targeting with a benchmark interest rate...

We describe Peru's experience of chronic inflation through the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the need for inflationary taxation in a regime of fiscal dominance of monetary policy. Hyperinflation occurred when further debt accumulation became unavailable, and a populist administration engaged in...

The objective of this paper is to analyze the monetary and fiscal history of Mexico using as framework the model of Sargent and Wallace (1981). I study the period 1960-2016. I evaluate the ability of the model to explain the crises of 1982 and 1994. The model can explain the 1982 Debt Crisis,...

Studying the modern economic histories of the ten largest countries in South America and Mexico teaches us the lack of fiscal discipline has been at the root of most of the region's macroeconomic instability. The lack of fiscal discipline, however, takes various forms not measured in the primary...

The paper is aimed at quantifying empirically the monetary transmission mechanism for Argentine, and at analyzing the responses of output, inflation, and money market mutual funds (MMMF) to a positive monetary shock. The idea of incorporating MMMF into the system is to understand how economic...

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Brazil went through a sequence of failed stabilization plans that tried to cope with an enduring hyperinflation. This paper uses a money demand model to evaluate monetary policies during those episodes. The consistency between the money...

The paper examines intergovernmental fiscal relations in the Caribbean from the perspective of general principles of fiscal federalism and international practice, and considers the effects of intergovernmental design on macroeconomic management

This paper analyses several severe financial crises observed in the history of capitalism which led to a longer period of stagnation or low growth. Comparative case studies of the Great Depression, the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s and the Japanese crisis of the 1990s and 2000s are...