After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...

Banco de la República's FX intervention policy is described, with a focus on its objectives and main features. Then, based on a survey of the effectiveness of sterilized intervention in Colombia, it is argued that this tool is not useful to cope with the challenges posed by medium term external...

Las monedas locales de los países en vías de desarrollo, además de no ser librementeconvertibles a nivel internacional, suelen experimentar niveles de inflación superiores ymás volátiles, al tiempo que tienden a sufrir periodos de fuerte apreciación y depreciación.Estas bien conocidas...

Latin American economies are exposed to substantial external vulnerability. Domestic imbalances and terms of trade shocks are often exacerbated by sudden stops of capital inflow. In this paper we explore ways of overcoming external vulnerability, drawing lessons from a detailed comparison of the...

We examine the relationship between the short-term volatility of the <em>effective</em> Real Exchange Rate (RER) and the degree of flexibility of the nominal exchange rate. Existing evidence demonstrates that the short-term variance of bilateral RERs is on average about 12 times higher under floating...