Honduras’s Third Review under the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility and Request for Waiver and Modification of Performance Criteria are discussed. The current stance of monetary and exchange rate policies are broadly appropriate, and financial sector reforms are proceeding. Progress...

This paper provides an overview of statistical measurement issues relating to alternative measures of core inflation, and the criteria for choosing among them. The approaches to measurement considered include exclusion-based methods, imputation methods, limited influence estimators, reweighting,...

We explore monetary policy transmission by estimating VAR impulse response functions to illustrate the Belarusian economy's response to unexpected changes in policy and exogenous variables. We find a significant exchange rate pass-through to prices, and interest rate policy following, rather...

This paper examines the pattern of excess liquidity in sub-Saharan Africa and its consequences for the effectiveness of monetary policy. The paper argues that understanding the consequences of excess liquidity requires quantifying the extent to which commercial bank holdings of excess liquidity...

As China's economy becomes more market based and continues its rapid integration into the global economy, having an independent and effective monetary policy regime oriented to domestic objectives will become increasingly important. Employing modern principles of monetary policy in light of the...

How should a central bank organize itself to produce the best possible inflation forecast? This paper discusses elements for building a comprehensive platform for an inflation forecasting framework. It describes the exercise of forecasting inflation as a production process, which induces a...

This paper explores the determinants of long-term government bond yields in the Group of Seven (G-7) economies and analyzes the factors that could explain the conundrum of very low rates in the face of a variety of adverse factors in recent years. In particular, the paper focuses on the...

This paper examines the impact of a monetary policy shock on output, prices, and the nominal effective exchange rate for Kenya using data during 1997–2005. Based on techniques commonly used in the vector autoregression literature, the main results suggest that an exogenous increase in the...