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This book written by the staff of the IMF Institute, offers a series of workshops on Kenya that are used as a case study in the Institute's course on Financial Analysis and Policy for officials of IMF member countries. The workshops combine theory and practice for a better understanding of the use of major financial policy instruments in the management of national economies.
This study examines the links between adjustment policies and growth in a small group of developing countries- Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, India, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, and Thailand - during 1970 -93. It provides an overview of the adjustment and growth experience, examines in depth several policy issues of particular interest, and distills the principal policy lessons for the design of adjustment policies.
The 12 papers in this book, edited by Gerard Caprio, David Folkerts-Landau, and Timothy D. Lane, explore issues in building a financial structure suitable for economies in transition. They cover for main topics: the problem of old and new debts; the development of a sound and efficient payment system; the establishment of an appropriate financial structure; and the importance of credit in the development of the the real economy.
This paper reviews and analyzes how Morocco overcame the economic and financial crisis it confronted at the beginning of the 1980s. It highlights the challenges that still confront the Moroccan economy and the lessons that can be drawn from Morocco's adjustment experience.
Islam proposes the replacement of an interest-based financial system with one which operates on the basis of risk and profit sharing. Using a general equilibrium model, this paper investigates some open-economy implications of the adoption of Islamic banking for growth and stabilization of the economy. It analyzes the long-run effects of Islamic banking on international capital flows and on the economy’s capacity to adjust to disturbances. It concludes that monetary policy can be used effectively for stabilization purposes and that disturbances to asset positions are absorbed efficiently in an Islamic financial system.
This paper examines the issue of whether the money supply can serve as a nominal anchor for the domestic price level under real exchange rate targeting. When capital controls are perfect so that there is complete separation between official and unofficial markets for foreign exchange, the domestic inflation rate can be stabilized, but only at the expense of a widening gap between official and parallel market exchange rates. When cross - transactions between the two markets are permitted, the steady state of the model is identical to that of a model without capital controls and, hence, the money supply cannot serve as a nominal anchor for the price level in the long run. If capital controls are nevertheless maintained temporarily, and are known to be temporary, targeting the money supply fails to stabilize the rate of inflation even in the short run.
Even modest investment rates may achieve satisfactory rates of growth in the reforming economies of Eastern Europe because their relative capital scarcity implies high rates of productivity for capital. The most serious obstacle to private investment is uncertainty about the reform process, which can potentially rule out all but the most profitable projects. This problem sharply increases the payoff from accelerating the structural reform process. Regarding savings, critical aspects are the changes in methods of financing resulting from economic reform, and the availability of foreign savings, both in the form of loans and foreign direct investment.
This paper examines the relative importance of monetary growth and exchange rate depreciation as causes of inflation in a sample of 10 Sub-Saharan African countries. Causality tests and impulse response functions derived from vector autoregression (VAR) analysis suggest that both monetary expansion and exchange rate adjustments cause inflation in a number of these countries. However, the failure of the tests to attribute the bulk of the variance in inflation in most of the countries to either variable suggests either a problem with the statistical technique or that some other factor--perhaps structural bottlenecks or a measure of overall macroeconomic policy stance incorporating both monetary and exchange rate policy--may be even more important as a determinant of inflation in African countries.
This paper summarizes the methods and types of indicators that are often employed, both insid and outside the IMF, to assess whether exchange rates are broadly in line with economic fundamentals.