Supporting Studies for the World Economic Outlook, prepared by IMF staff, provide a more detailed analysis of issues recently covered in the main pubication. The current edition includes studies of globalization and growth, the future of the international financial system, currency crises,...

Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity....

Over the past fifteen years, a significant number of industrialized and middle-income countries have adopted inflation targeting as a framework for monetary policymaking. As the name suggests, in such inflation-targeting regimes, the central bank is responsible for achieving a publicly announced...

Consider a central bank that can adjust the in ation rate by increasing and decreasing the level of the key interest rate. Each intervention gives rise to proportional costs, and the central bank faces also a running penalty, e.g., due to misaligned levels of in ation and interest rate. We model...

With the release of Treasury papers from the 1970s under the 30-year rule we have a much more complete picture of the dispute in the 1970s between the Treasury and the Cambridge Economic Policy Group, especially given the role of three Cambridge economists. Nicholas Kaldor, Wynne Godley and...