The paper integrates the analysis of price volatility and supply instability for a commodity exporting country, adding consideration of the role of the non-tradable sector to the literature. The non-tradable sector plays a potentially significant role in changing the economy`s response to...

In a monetary policy model incorporating partial persistence in inflation it is shown that inflation bias is reduced and the response to shocks improved if the policy maker has a discount rate lower than its true social value. Thus a patient central banker is shown to be a third mechanism for...

The paper is concerned with foreign investment in developing countries and the incentives offered to attract that investment in relation to the use of a possible future multilateral investment agreement as a commitment device over incentive levels. The existing literature has identified two...

The paper considers the irreversible investment response to trade liberalisation when agents perceive there to be a positive probability that the liberalisation may be reversed. It is shown that even with full credibility the aggregate investment response may be weak since investment will...

Many trade liberalisations and other economic reforms in developing countries, particularly in Africa, have been reversed. In addition to the loss of benefits from reform as such this tendency has led to concern that the response to reform, particularly from investment, may be weakened by the...

Models in which pricing decisions depend on indexing or rule of thumb behaviour have become prominent in the monetary policy literature and tend to match macroeconomic data well given their prediction of inflation persistence. The extent to which firms index their prices to past inflation has...

The paper sets out the credibility problem in carbon policy, provides a number of examples of non-credibility in recent energy policy, and identifies the costs of failing to address it. The time inconsistency of carbon policy--arising because of multiple objectives, the irreversibility of energy...

The paper presents a monetary policy model with an endogenous capital stock when a backward looking element in wage setting causes inflation persistence. We analyse how the endogeneity of the capital stock changes the macroeconomic dynamics with which policy interacts and its implications for...