Analyzes the costs and benefits of full dollarization, or the adoption by one country of another country’s currency. Potential advantages include lower borrowing costs and deeper integration into world markets. But countries lose the ability to devalue, and become dependent on the U.S....

The “traditional structural approach” to the determination of real commodity prices has relied exclusively on demand factors as the fundamentals that explain the behavior of commodity prices. This framework, however, has been unable to explain the marked and sustained weakness in commodity...

We examine the implications of high degrees of dollarization for the choice of exchange rate regime and the information content of various monetary aggregates in developing countries. We conclude that a high degree of currency substitution argues for a more fixed exchange rate regime, while...

This paper uses a dynamic optimization model to estimate the welfare gains of hedging against commodity price risk for commodity-exporting countries. The introduction of hedging instruments such as futures and options enhances domestic welfare through two channels. First, by reducing export...

This paper seeks to revive the case for countries to self-insure against economic growth slowdowns by issuing GDP-indexed bonds. We simulate the effects of GDP-indexed bonds under different assumptions about fiscal policy reaction functions and their output effects and find that they could...

The Fund has recognized in recent years that one cannot separate issues of economic growth and stability on one hand and equality on the other. Indeed, there is a strong case for considering inequality and an inability to sustain economic growth as two sides of the same coin. Central to the...

The relationship between current account developments and changes in the macroeconomic environment remains a key issue in open economy macroeconomics. This paper extends the standard intertemporal optimizing model of the current account to incorporate the effects of macroeconomic uncertainty on...

This paper shows that the response of inflation to external shocks is very different when the authorities target the real exchange rate than when they follow a fixed exchange rate or a preannounced crawling peg. Specifically, shocks that would have no effect on the steady-state inflation rate...

It is often argued that the parallel market premium is a useful indicator of real exchange rate misalignment in developing countries. The empirical evidence does not, however, suggest the existence of a robust correlation between these two endogenous variables that is independent of the nature...