Abstract T he financial crisis in 2007-2008 has turned into the most far-reaching international financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. Indeed, the crisis-affected Asian countries experienced varying degrees of changes in the exchange rate and prices following an initial shock of sharp depreciation of their currencies in the second half of 1997. Moreover,...

Standard economic models predict that the choice of an exchange rate regime has important implications for the interdependency of national monetary policies, which is sometimes measured by the degree of inflation transmission across borders. In this paper, we examine how inflation rates in two small open economies, namely Hong Kong and Singapore, interact with that in the U.S. It is found that ...

convertibility is an important factor in international trade where instruments valued in different currencies will be exchanged. convertibility can be either total manner or a partial manner. however, whatever the type of convertibility, there will be advantages and disadvantages to  the economy of a country of which has  made a convertibility of its national currency. convertibility was studie...

The justification for inflation targeting rests on three core propositions. The first is called ‘lean against the wind’, which refers to fact that the monetary authority contracts (expands) aggregate demand below capacity when the actual rate of inflation is above (below) target. The second is ‘the divine coincidence’, which means that stabilizing the rate of inflation around its target is tant...

At the end of 1999, the Swiss National Bank modified its monetary policy concept and abandoned monetary targeting in favor of an approach based on an inflation forecast. Although central bank money or the monetary base, the SNB's intermediate target variable, was plagued by instabilities, the switch to a new policy framework was motivated by more fundamental problems arising from monetary targe...

In this paper, we examine whether a monetary authority targets the exchange rate, per se, or instead simply appears to do so as it responds to the exchange rate and other variables in service to inflation and output targets. We combine data-rich estimation with a system of forward-looking equations in order to disentangle the possibilities. The combined approach reveals the potentially misleadi...

We are grateful to participants at that workshop and colleagues at the Reserve Bank for their comments on the paper. We are particularly indebted to Luci Ellis for numerous comments and technical assistance with the use of Mathematica. The views expressed in this paper are our own and should not be attributed to the Reserve Bank of Australia.