This paper motivates and describes an approach to forecasting and monetary policy analysis based on the use of a simple structural macroeconomic model, along the lines of those in use in a number of central banks. It contrasts this approach with financial programming and its emphasis on monetary...

This paper examines determinants of inflation in Ukraine during 1993-2002 in a cointegrating framework. Two basic theoretical models-a markup and a money market model-are tested. While broad money is cointegrated with the CPI for the whole sample and for early subsamples, the cointegration...

The Maastricht inflation criterion, designed in the early 1990s to bring "high-inflation" EU countries in line with "low-inflation" countries prior to the introduction of the euro, poses challenges for both new EU member countries and the European Central Bank. While the criterion has positively...

This paper surveys the evidence on the effectiveness of monetary transmission in low-income countries. It is hard to come away from this review with much confidence in the strength of monetary transmission in such countries. We distinguish between the "facts on the ground" and "methodological...

This paper estimates a small open economy model for Egypt to analyze inflation, output dynamics and monetary policy during 2005-2010. The interest rate channel is found to be relatively weak in Egypt, complicating the use of interest rates as the immediate target of monetary policy. However, the...

The paper investigates the sources of real output variability in Croatia by assessing the impact of macroeconomic structural shocks on fl uctuations in real output. The analysis is based on a structural vector autoregressive model (SVAR) where structural shocks (demand, supply and nominal) are...

One of the most challenging areas relating to the European Monetary Union (EMU) enlargement is the question of new member countries’ vulnerability to exogenous shocks related to euro adoption. Even if well prepared, and also considering the business cycles of the EMU candidate countries became...