Until the early 1980s, foreign exchange rate controls were the dominant policy in Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda. However, because of the huge fiscal deficits and expansionary monetary policies, coupled with chronic terms of trade shocks and policy error/inadequacies, the foreign exchange rates is...

The study documented agricultural policies through the period 1970-1993; implementation deviation for ten agricultural policy variables, eight of which are fiscal and two monetary; and identified discontinuities in agricultural policies. In addition, it computed volatility measures for ten...

The authors provide some evidence consistent with a heterogeneous credit channel of monetary policy transmission in the European Union. Using the techniques of cointegration and Error Correction Models, the authors have shown that the external finance premium is one important leading indicator...

Recently, several central banks have abandoned the usual secrecy in monetary policy and become very transparent. This paper provides an explanation for this puzzling fact, focussing on the disclosure of central bank forecasts. It shows that transparency reduces the inflationary bias and gives...

Sargent and Wallace (1981) have shown by an example, termed "spectacular", that a lowering of the growth rate of money may in some cases increase the rate of inflation - not only in the end, but even from the start. I show that this "spectacular" result ceases to hold if the central bank is...

We define and study transparency, credibilitym and reputation in a model where the central bank's characteristics are unobservable to the private sector and are inferred from the policy outcome. A low-credibility bank optimally conducts a more inflationary policy than a high-credibility bank, in...

The first section of this paper presents a model of the economy and poses the problem of optimal monetary policy. The second characterizes the responses of endogenous variables, including nominal interest rates, to shocks under an optimal regime, and highlights the advantages of commitment, by...

This paper discusses how price stability can be defined and how price stability can be maintained in practive. Some lessons for the Eurosystem are also considered.

We examine a central bank's endogenous choice of degree of control and degree of transparency, under both commitment and discretion. We argue that discretion is the more realistic assumption for the choice of control and that commitment is more realistic for the choice of transparency.