This paper examines trade reforms of uncertain duration in economies affected by real shocks. These reforms induce consumption booms regardless of their duration and of the degree of intertemporal substitution. A recession may follow the boom, depending on the outcome of the reform and on...

There is general puzzlement in both academic and policymaking circles about the supposed failure of the liberalization experiments that were undertaken in the mid- to late 1970s by some developing countries, particularly those located in the Southern Cone of Latin America (Argentina, Chile, and...

The liberalization of foreign trade and capital movements, or what is commonly termed opening up the economy, is a subject of increasing interest to developing countries, including many in Latin America. While the longer-run costs and benefits of such a strategy may be well known, there has been...

The early stages of transformation of centrally planned economies into market economies are examined. In the transitional phase when an economy is no longer centrally planned, but not yet market based--when it is a "previously centrally planned economy"--expectations play a key role. A model is...

The possibility of reducing the real value of domestic nonindexed government debt through inflation is studied. A central result is that this kind of debt liquidation is possible even though prices are sticky and government bonds are short term. A policy implication is that short bond maturities...

The role of debt maturity in managing the government's incentives to use opportunistic inflation to reduce the ex post real value of its nominal liabilities is explored. The maturity structure of government debt is shown to be a powerful instrument for affecting the time profile of the inflation...

The characteristics of recent capital inflows into Latin America are discussed. It is argued that these inflows are partly explained by conditions outside the region, like the recession in the United States and lower international interest rates. The importance of external factors suggests that...

An important obstacle encountered in analyzing interest rate targeting is that standard models usually lead to indeterminacy of the price level or the inflation rate. This paper develops a simple framework that avoids such problems, because the bonds whose interest rate is controlled provide...

This paper examines factors determining the allocation of bank credit to the enterprise sector and the implications of this allocation for aggregate supply and macroeconomic performance in the former socialist economies. It first develops a model to explain how changes in demand for money by the...