The volatile movements in commodity prices during the last years have raised new questions to be discussed in both policy and academic spheres. Up to the financial slump of the second quarter of 2008 commodity prices grew fast for several consecutive years in a highly volatile context. The...

This paper aims at identifying the underlying reasons for substantial accumulation of foreign reserves, a strategy currently followed by a large number of countries. To this end, it first studies international liquidity conditions and individual country demand for reserves. It then analyses...

The uncertainty around monetary policy decision-making requires central banks to make extensive use of macroeconomic models both to analyze the current economic situation and to forecast the evolution of the main economic variables. The Small Economic Model (SEM) for Argentina describes in a...

Monetary policymaking requires an adequate appraisal of price dynamics and reliable forecasts for short and medium term inflation. Since the relevant inflation for monetary policy purpose may not be adequately measured by conventional consumer price indexes, there is a need for core inflation...

Economic policy usually faces a number of risks and uncertainties, as a byproduct of the changing nature of signals, the economic structure, the interaction of aggregate variables, the mutations in the behavior of economic agents and their reaction to policy decisions. It is generally...

The last few years have seen an explosion of Dynamic and Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models built for policy analysis and forecasting in industrialized countries. The set of papers presented to the recent joint U.S. Federal Reserve Board-European Central Bank-IMF conference: "DSGE...