The impacts of economic structures on the performance of simple policy rules in a small open economy

Applying a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model, the performance of various simple rules is analyzed in a small open economy context. The aspects that are considered in the analysis include the degree of exchange rate pass-through, trade openness, the policy objective and the source and persistency of shocks. The main objective of this analysis is to investigate if the rule reacts to exchange rate performs better than the basic closed economy rule without exchange rate term. Comparison on the performances is also made between the consumer inflation targeting and domestic inflation targeting rules. The results show that adding the exchange rate term to the policy rule enhances improvement especially in the higher pass-through case. The superior rule is the hybrid rule that reacts to the exchange rate term. CPI inflation targeting rules outperform the domestic inflation targeting rules in term of welfare loss. However, more complicated domestic inflation targeting rules generate lower loss in term of relative loss. On the second part of this chapter, comparisons on the performances of different exchange rate regimes are made under different source and persistency of shocks. The floating (pegged) regime is favored under more prominent real (nominal) shocks. The results suggest that emerging countries that experience very large real shocks should float their exchange rate.