The paper investigates four challenges to exchange rate stability in the coming years and explores their implications for macroeconomic and exchange rate policy. The first section explores the importance of seigniorage in financing the government budget in Southern European countries. The second...

When governments attempt stabilization why do they not undertake a programme certain to succeed? The paper discusses credibility when it is inconceivable that a programme will succeed with probability one. A cost-benefit analysis establishes an equilibrium programme that has some ex ante...

The monetary overhang, pervasive with price controls and shortages in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, offers close parallels to the post-1945 picture of Europe. At that time monetary reform was used in many countries, in one form or another, to bring liquid assets in line with the...

In early 1990, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Yugoslavia and Poland were experiencing extreme instability or, at least, the early stages of stabilization. Other countries, like Bolivia, had already run the course and stabilized or, like Mexico, had avoided the extreme experience and opted for...

This paper investigates the roles played by the global macroeconomic environment and by Brazilian policy in shaping the Brazilian debt crisis, and assesses the prospects for Brazil's sovereign debt after five years of the `muddling-through' strategy. We first examine Brazilian debt from a...

The tradition in discussions of stabilization is to assume that fiscal austerity, competitive real exchange rates, sound financial markets and deregulation provide the preconditions for a resumption of growth. There is, however, a need to distinguish the necessary and the sufficient conditions....

This paper discusses a number of issues that the newly constituted board of the European Central Bank (ECB) will face early on. We show how conducting a European monetary policy is very different from living under the protective umbrella of the Bundesbank. We discuss voting on the ECB board, and...

This paper revises and extends our previous (1986) analysis of rates of return on sterling and dollar foreign loans of the 1920s. It analyzes a larger sample of 250 dollar bonds and 125 sterling issues, covering the years 1920-9. Internal rates of return are adjusted for repurchases of...

This paper shows how in theory, if the contingencies in response to which it is imposed are fully anticipated, independently verifiable and not under government control, then saving and investment should not fall following the imposition of a capital levy. Nor should the government find it more...

This paper analyses the costs and benefits of European monetary unification. The benefits take the form of the reduction in exchange risk, equalization of interest rates, decline in relative price variability and general increase in economic efficiency likely to accompany unification. The costs...