This paper seeks to draw lessons from the IMF’s experience in handling financial crises around the globe over the past ten years that are relevant to the challenges faced by countries in Latin America, especially in the wake of the recent crisis in Argentina. Experience suggests that...

South Africa’s macroeconomic policies face a complicated task of balancing between supporting domestic demand and maintaining stability. The Selected Issues paper for South Africa discusses economic development and policies. Although the opening output gap and declining employment do call...

This paper proposes a new taxonomy of monetary regimes defined by the choice and clarity of the nominal anchor. The regimes are as follows: (i) monetary nonautonomy, (ii) weak anchor, (iii) money anchor, (iv) exchange rate peg, (v) full-fledged inflation targeting, (vi) implicit price stability...

Under a flexible inflation targeting regime, should policymakers avoid any reaction to movements in the foreign exchange market? Using data for six advanced open economies explicitly targeting inflation, the paper examines empirically whether real exchange rate disequilibria systematically...

The most salient trend in monetary policy over the past two decades has been increasing reliance on money market operations, which reflects the belief that allowing market forces to allocate financial resources brings about increased economic efficiency and growth. However, small economies and...

This paper proposes a markedly different transmission mechanism from monetary policy to the macroeconomy, focusing on how policy changes nominal inertia in the Phillips curve. Using recent theoretical developments, we examine the properties of a small, estimated U.S. monetary model...

This paper argues that the IMF's traditional monetary conditionality-a ceiling on net domestic assets of the central bank and a floor on its net international reserves-should be adapted in IMF-supported adjustment programs with countries which have a framework of explicit inflation targets for...

This paper focuses on monetary and exchange rate policies in Colombia, with particular emphasis on the period 1999-2002, when flotation of the peso and inflation targeting were adopted. We argue, first, in favor of adopting "operational inflation target ranges" and, second, in favor of...

This paper describes the basic structure, underlying philosophy, and key behavioral properties of MULTIMOD. It also focuses on several recent applications of macromodels in the IMF’s policy analysis, emphasizing that most questions put forward for analysis with models like MULTIMOD are...

Heavy foreign exchange intervention by central banks of emerging markets have lead to sizeable expansions of their balance sheets in recent years?accumulating foreign assets and non-money domestic liabilities (the latter due to sterilization operations). With domestic liabilities being mostly of...