Malaysia has sustained over four decades of rapid, inclusive growth, reducing its dependence on agriculture and commodity exports to become a more diversified, modern and open economy. GDP per capita is now higher than in a number of OECD economies, while poverty and income inequality have...

We discuss the issue of time consistency of monetary policy. We develop a simple and intuitive procedure to derive analytically the unconditionally optimal (UO) policy in a general linear-quadratic set-up, a perspective stressed by Taylor (1979) and Whiteman (1986). We compare the UO perspective...

The G-20 Data Gaps Initiative (DGI), which aimed at addressing the information needs that were revealed by the 2007/2008 global financial crisis, concluded its first phase and started a second phase (DGI-2) with the endorsement of G-20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in September...

This paper establishes that one can generally obtain a purely quadratic approximation to the unconditional expectation of social welfare when the steady-state is distorted. A specific example is provided employing a canonical New Keynesian model. Unlike in the non-distorted steady state case,...

We develop a simple and intuitive approach for analytically deriving unconditionally optimal (UO) policies, a topic of enduring interest in optimal monetary policy analysis. The approach can be employed to both general linear-quadratic problems and to the underlying non-linear environments. We...

In this paper we study the impact of a temporary lack of credibility in a transition to price stability. We quantify the effects of a period of disinflation on temporary output losses, and the impact of the lack of credibility on the optimal speed on disinflation. We demonstrate that the...

Sudden capital outflows were at the heart of the 1997-98 Asian crisis. Ten years later, capital flows are back on the policy agenda, but in a very different context. The countries of East Asia are now getting more inflows than they can effectively absorb and the upward pressure on exchange rates...

This paper analyses the issue of the dynamics of the TARGET2 system balances during the sovereign debt crisis, when some countries registered a decisive inflow of the central bank liquidity and others showed an outflow. The dynamics in the TARGET2 are here explained as being due to a fall in the...

On 3 July 2015, SUERF organized its sixth joint conference with the Bank of Finland in Helsinki on the subject of liquidity and market efficiency. The one-day program consisted of an opening speech, six presentations, including three keynotes, and a lunchtime address. The present SUERF Study...

This paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium two-country optimizing model to analyze the consequences of international capital mobility for the effectiveness of monetary policy in open economies. The model shows that the substitutability of goods produced in different countries plays a central...