The paper surveys the major economic, financial, and administrative issues that confront social security systems in Latin America. The larger systems have contributed substantially to public sector financial disequilibria. Expenditures of the younger systems with more limited coverage could...

This paper examines external adjustment in the U.S., Japan and Germany from the perspective of net foreign asset positions. It asks two questions: What are, in the long run, the determinants of net foreign asset equilibrium? and: What are, in the short run, the adjustment mechanisms sustaining...

This paper describes a simulation model that can serve as a basis for a developing country growth-oriented adjustment program. The model has been designed to provide explicit links between fiscal, monetary and exchange rate policies and major macroeconomic variables. While the model is applied...

Market-oriented economic reforms in centrally planned economies have altered the functions and objectives of key policy instruments, particularly in the case of fiscal policy. As a result of reform, economic management requires the use of “indirect” levers to regulate the behavior of...

This paper explains why sovereign issuers of reserve currencies do not use unexpected inflation to repudiate their foreign liabilities. Monetary restraint is exercised because of the fear that reserve users will switch to other currencies if an attempt is made to raise “excessive” revenue....

This paper reviews the main features of market-oriented foreign trade reforms in planned economies. It considers reform initiatives aimed at expanding enterprise autonomy and breaking up the state monopoly of foreign trade, modifying the exchange rate system, and reforming the domestic price...

We show that the presence of nominal non-indexed government debt could give rise to more than one equilibrium inflation rate. Conditions for this to occur are discussed in terms of ad hoc and micro-founded models. Solutions to the indeterminacy problem are examined; one solution is shown to be...

This paper is concerned with debt-equity swaps in which foreign residents are a party to the exchange (i.e., it does not deal with flight capital), and with debt forgiveness. The seemingly unrelated issues of debt-equity swaps and debt forgiveness are jointly treated in this study, because debt...

In this paper we generalize the target zone exchange rate as model formalized by Krugman (1988b). The main contributions of these pages consist of linking the recent developments in the theory of target zones to the mirror image theory of speculative attacks on asset price fixing regimes and in...

This paper analyzes the dynamics of the real exchange rate and the price of equity for a small open economy using an optimizing model in which the process of capital accumulation entails adjustment costs. The analysis demonstrates that along an adjustment path toward long-run equilibrium,...