The People's Bank of China (PBC) has made great strides in modernizing its monetary policy frameworks but their effectiveness will diminish as the sophistication of the economy increases. Empirical evidence supports maintaining a reference to money in China's monetary strategy and enhancing the...

This paper examines the monetary transmission mechanism in Egypt against the background of the central bank's intention to shift to inflation targeting. It first describes the changing transmission channels over the last decade. Second, the channels are evaluated in a VAR model. The exchange...

This paper reviews the current monetary and exchange rate policy frameworks in Armenia and Georgia, and the challenges associated with the choice of a credible nominal anchor in the context of large nominal and real shocks. The paper makes a case for a gradual transition to full-fledged...

This paper contributes to the existing literature on central bank repoauctions. It is based on a structural econometric approach, whereby the primitives of bidding behavior (individual bid schedules and bid-shading components) are directly estimated. With the estimated parameters we calibrate a...

This paper uses real-time briefing forecasts prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to provide estimates of historical changes in the design of U.S. monetary policy and in the implied central-bank target for inflation. Empirical results support a description of policy with an...

We calculate indexes of central bank autonomy (CBA) for 163 central banks as of end-2003, and comparable indexes for a subgroup of 68 central banks as of the end of the 1980s. The results confirm strong improvements in both economic and political CBA over the past couple of decades, although...

This paper evaluates whether Georgia is ready to adopt inflation targeting (IT), a monetary policy framework that several emerging markets have adopted recently. After reviewing selected prerequisites for successfully implementing IT, the paper focuses on whether one specific precondition is in...

This Selected Issues paper and Statistical Appendix on Angola underlie monetary policy framework. Angola has adopted an anti-inflation policy that has led to a sharp decline in inflation. To institute a monetary policy framework, a nominal anchor or constraint on the value of domestic currency...