This paper carefully investigates some of the existing hypothesis regarding the transmission of different colonial legacies to modern day economic performance in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It focuses on four key channels of transmission namely, human capital, trade openness, market distortion and...

The paper analyses inflation targeting when two independent policy authorities (a central bank and a National Government) have divergent preferences for the optimal policy mix. We demonstrate that the main advantage of inflation targeting, as a policy regime, is that it represents a simple proxy...

In a world characterized by noisy information and conflicting signals, no central bank is able to affect private-sector expectations at all times. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of any central bank communication strategy, it is important to know what private agents rely on when they form...

We identify credible monetary policy with first, a disconnect between inflation and inflation expectations and second, the anchoring of the latter at the inflation target announced by the monetary authorities. We test empirically whether this is the case for a number of countries that have an...

We identify credible monetary policy with first, a disconnect between inflation and inflation expectations and second, the anchoring of the latter at the inflation target announced by the monetary authorities. We test empirically whether this is the case for a number of countries that have an...

The benefits of inflation targeting by comparison to alternative regimesare understood to be in terms of providing clearer objectives that help pin down private sector expectations in the long run. We argue that the mechanism for achieving this rests on the fact that monetary policy can be...

Fiscal policy can affect monetary policy either through debt monetisation or through a direct effect on price dynamics. The former is the conventional classical view rooted in the quantity theory of money while the latter is the modern view of the Fiscal Theory of Price Determination. Based on...

More than a monetary policy strategy, we interpret inflation targeting as a framework for communication. We model monetary policy as an information game between the Bank and private agents. Our analysis shows how the provision of an explicit numerical inflation objective overcomes potential...