Since the early 1990s, a number of countries have adopted Inflation Targeting (IT) in an effort to reduce inflation. Most literature has praised IT as a superior framework of monetary policy. We suggest that IT is a major policy prescription closely associated with the New Consensus...

Este documento analiza el impacto de un shock en la tasa de interés externa en la economía chilena. Con este fin, se estima un modelo empírico de Vectores Autoregresivos y adicionalmente se desarrolla un modelo estocástico de equilibrio general calibrado y parametrizado para la economía...

Pareto-efficient consumption in a pure-exchange, one good economy varies over states of nature with respect to only two factors: real aggregate supply and individual utility shocks. One’s optimal contract receipts vary with respect to only these two factors and the ratio of one’s endowment...

The West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) has a history of monetary stability and low inflation. Nevertheless, there is substantial variation in relative prices within some UEMOA countries, in particular in the price of food relative to other elements of the retail price index (IHPC)....

We assume that central banks can control inflation so that inflation rates reflect the preferences of the central bank council.The hypothesis to be tested is that these preferences depend on the central bankers’ educational and/or professional background. In a panel data analysis for the euro...

In this study we examine the impact on Hungary of a possible correction of global imbalances. We distinguished four different channels of the global adjustment process, which are widely referred to in the literature (fiscal tightening in the U.S.; housing price correction in the US; an increase...

The interest rate policy of the Magyar Nemzeti Bank typically consists of taking several smaller steps in one direction. Other central banks follow similar practices. Their interest rate policy actions are characterised by gradual changes: in other words, they avoid sudden, major changes in...

The focus of this paper is on the use of staff policy recommendations in central banks. Based on the responses to a recent survey conducted by the Bank of International Settlements, the paper tries to answer two questions. (1) How (to what extent) do central bank decision-makers make use of...

This paper re-examines a problem of congested inputs in the Chinese automobile and textile industries, which was identified by Cooper et al. (Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 35 (2001) 227-242). These authors employed a single approach to measuring congestion, however, so it is of interest to...