This paper provides estimates of the demand for both narrow and broad monetary aggregates for the five largest industrial countries using two recent approaches: buffer stock and error correction models. The performances of these models are compared with several versions of the conventional...

This paper provides estimates of the demand for both narrow and broad monetary aggregates for the five largest industrial countries using two recent approaches: buffer stock and error correction models. The performances of these models are compared with several versions of the conventional...

This pamphlet is an adapted and updated version of the prologue to Tearing Down Walls: The International Monetary Fund 1990-1999, by the same author. That book examines a tumultuous decade in which the IMF faced difficult challenges and took on new and expanded roles. Among these were assisting...

The IMF played a key role in developing and implementing the debt strategy throughout the 1980s. That strategy not only overcame the crisis but also produced successful transformationsof several major economiesin Latin America. Nonetheless, the IMF's role has also been criticized on several...

The CFA franc zone comprises a group of countries in central and west Africa whose currencies have been firmly linked to the French franc since 1948. It combines the features of a currency union with those of an exchange rate peg, and an analysis of its effectiveness must examine both...

The low level of primary commodity prices since 1985 is examined in the context of the behavior of those prices relative to prices of manufactured goods since 1854. The Prebisch-Singer hypothesis of a secular decline in relative commodity prices is sustained, but the recent decline is shown to...

A recent paper by Baba, Hendry, and Starr presents an error-correction model of the demand for M1 in the United States, which shows a dramatic improvement in both fit and stability over earlier models. This note estimates an alternative model with the same data set and draws two conclusions:...

Many studies of the demand for money, covering a wide variety of economies, have demonstrated the importance of financial innovations and shifts in monetary policy regimes, but they have also illustrated the difficulty of measuring and assessing such changes. Because innovations and regime...