Download or read book Inflation Expectations written by Peter J. N. Sinclair and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-12-16 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

Download or read book The Distributional Implications of the Impact of Fuel Price Increases on Inflation written by Mr. Kangni R Kpodar and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2021-11-12 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates the response of consumer price inflation to changes in domestic fuel prices, looking at the different categories of the overall consumer price index (CPI). We then combine household survey data with the CPI components to construct a CPI index for the poorest and richest income quintiles with the view to assess the distributional impact of the pass-through. To undertake this analysis, the paper provides an update to the Global Monthly Retail Fuel Price Database, expanding the product coverage to premium and regular fuels, the time dimension to December 2020, and the sample to 190 countries. Three key findings stand out. First, the response of inflation to gasoline price shocks is smaller, but more persistent and broad-based in developing economies than in advanced economies. Second, we show that past studies using crude oil prices instead of retail fuel prices to estimate the pass-through to inflation significantly underestimate it. Third, while the purchasing power of all households declines as fuel prices increase, the distributional impact is progressive. But the progressivity phases out within 6 months after the shock in advanced economies, whereas it persists beyond a year in developing countries.

Download or read book Monetary Policy in Low Inflation Economies written by David E. Altig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-31 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume investigate the challenges of transitioning to lower levels of inflation and conducting monetary policy in low-inflation economies. The essays make both theoretical and empirical contributions.

Download or read book Inflation in Open Economies written by Michael Parkin and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1978 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Inflation and Welfare written by Ben Craig and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Welfare State in Transition written by Richard B. Freeman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once heralded in the 1950s and 1960s as a model welfare state, Sweden is now in transition and in trouble since its economic plunge in the early 1990s. This volume presents ten essays that examine Sweden's economic problems from a U.S. perspective. Exploring such diverse topics as income equalization and efficiency, welfare and tax policy, wage determination and unemployment, and international competitiveness and growth, they consider how Sweden's welfare state succeeded in eliminating poverty and became a role model for other countries. They then reflect on Sweden's past economic problems, such as the increase in government spending and the fall in industrial productivity, warning of problems to come. Finally they review the consequences of the collapse of Sweden's economy in the early 1990s, exploring the implications of its efforts to reform its welfare state and reestablish a healthy economy. This volume will be of interest to policymakers and analysts, social scientists, and economists interested in welfare states.

Download or read book Hysteresis and Business Cycles written by Ms.Valerie Cerra and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2020-05-29 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as “hysteresis,” argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this paper, we review the recent empirical and theoretical literature that motivate this paradigm shift. The renewed interest in hysteresis has been sparked by the persistence of the Global Financial Crisis and fears of a slow recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. The findings of the recent literature have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. In recessions, monetary and fiscal policies need to be more active to avoid the permanent scars of a downturn. And in good times, running a high-pressure economy could have permanent positive effects.

Download or read book Money Payments and Liquidity second edition written by Guillaume Rocheteau and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-05-12 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of a book presenting a unified framework for studying the role of money and liquid assets in the economy, revised and updated. In Money, Payments, and Liquidity, Guillaume Rocheteau and Ed Nosal provide a comprehensive investigation into the economics of money, liquidity, and payments by explicitly modeling the mechanics of trade and its various frictions (including search, private information, and limited commitment). Adopting the last generation of the New Monetarist framework developed by Ricardo Lagos and Randall Wright, among others, Nosal and Rocheteau provide a dynamic general equilibrium framework to examine the frictions in the economy that make money and liquid assets play a useful role in trade. They discuss such topics as cashless economies; the properties of an asset that make it suitable to be used as a medium of exchange; the optimal monetary policy and the cost of inflation; the coexistence of money and credit; and the relationships among liquidity, asset prices, monetary policy; and the different measures of liquidity in over-the-counter markets. The second edition has been revised to reflect recent progress in the New Monetarist approach to payments and liquidity. Rocheteau and Nosal have added three new chapters: on unemployment and payments, on asset price dynamics and bubbles, and on crashes and recoveries in over-the-counter markets. The chapter on the role of money has been entirely rewritten, adopting a mechanism design approach. Other chapters have been revised and updated, with new material on credit economies under limited commitment, open-market operations and liquidity traps, and the limited pledgeability of assets under informational frictions.

Download or read book The Great Inflation written by Michael D. Bordo and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.

Download or read book Money Payments and Liquidity written by Ed Nosal and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-10-28 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two experts in monetary policy offer a unified framework for studying the role of money and liquid assets in the economy. In Money, Payments, and Liquidity, Ed Nosal and Guillaume Rocheteau provide a comprehensive investigation into the economics of money and payments by explicitly modeling trading frictions between agents. Adopting the search-theoretic approach pioneered by Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and Randall Wright, Nosal and Rocheteau provide a logically coherent dynamic framework to examine the frictions in the economy that make money and liquid assets play a useful role in trade. They discuss the implications of such frictions for the suitable properties of a medium of exchange, monetary policy, the cost of inflation, the inflation-output trade-off, the coexistence of money, credit, and higher return assets, settlement, and liquidity. After presenting the basic environment used throughout the book, Nosal and Rocheteau examine pure credit and pure monetary economies, and discuss the role of money, different pricing mechanisms, and the properties of money. In subsequent chapters they study monetary policy, the Friedman rule in particular, and the relationship between inflation and output under different information structures; economies where monetary exchange coexists with credit transactions; the coexistence of money and other assets such as another currency, capital, and bonds; and a continuous-time version of the model that describes over-the-counter markets and different dimensions of liquidity (bid-ask spreads, trade volume, trading delays).

Download or read book Designing a Simple Loss Function for Central Banks written by Davide Debortoli and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2017-07-21 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yes, it makes a lot of sense. This paper studies how to design simple loss functions for central banks, as parsimonious approximations to social welfare. We show, both analytically and quantitatively, that simple loss functions should feature a high weight on measures of economic activity, sometimes even larger than the weight on inflation. Two main factors drive our result. First, stabilizing economic activity also stabilizes other welfare relevant variables. Second, the estimated model features mitigated inflation distortions due to a low elasticity of substitution between monopolistic goods and a low interest rate sensitivity of demand. The result holds up in the presence of measurement errors, with large shocks that generate a trade-off between stabilizing inflation and resource utilization, and also when ensuring a low probability of hitting the zero lower bound on interest rates.

Download or read book Toward a More Accurate Measure of the Cost of Living written by United States. Congress. Senate. Advisory Commission to Study the Consumer Price Index and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Inflation in Emerging and Developing Economies written by Jongrim Ha and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2019-02-24 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive study in the context of EMDEs that covers, in one consistent framework, the evolution and global and domestic drivers of inflation, the role of expectations, exchange rate pass-through and policy implications. In addition, the report analyzes inflation and monetary policy related challenges in LICs. The report documents three major findings: In First, EMDE disinflation over the past four decades was to a significant degree a result of favorable external developments, pointing to the risk of rising EMDE inflation if global inflation were to increase. In particular, the decline in EMDE inflation has been supported by broad-based global disinflation amid rapid international trade and financial integration and the disruption caused by the global financial crisis. While domestic factors continue to be the main drivers of short-term movements in EMDE inflation, the role of global factors has risen by one-half between the 1970s and the 2000s. On average, global shocks, especially oil price swings and global demand shocks have accounted for more than one-quarter of domestic inflation variatio--and more in countries with stronger global linkages and greater reliance on commodity imports. In LICs, global food and energy price shocks accounted for another 12 percent of core inflation variatio--half more than in advanced economies and one-fifth more than in non-LIC EMDEs. Second, inflation expectations continue to be less well-anchored in EMDEs than in advanced economies, although a move to inflation targeting and better fiscal frameworks has helped strengthen monetary policy credibility. Lower monetary policy credibility and exchange rate flexibility have also been associated with higher pass-through of exchange rate shocks into domestic inflation in the event of global shocks, which have accounted for half of EMDE exchange rate variation. Third, in part because of poorly anchored inflation expectations, the transmission of global commodity price shocks to domestic LIC inflation (combined with unintended consequences of other government policies) can have material implications for poverty: the global food price spikes in 2010-11 tipped roughly 8 million people into poverty.

Download or read book IMF Staff Papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1963-01-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper discusses effects of inflation on economic development. A mild inflation may well encourage little, or no, evasion of the “inflation tax.” On the other hand, a strong inflation, and frequently a mild one also, will lead to community reactions which have effects like those of widespread tax evasion. A development policy may have wider aims than the encouragement of a high level of investment. Inflation has two effects on the desire for liquidity, which are related to the two basic reasons why individuals and businesses wish to hold liquid assets—the speculative and precautionary motives. Inflation increases the value of effective liquidity, thereby raising the community's desire for it, but it makes the most generally accepted store of liquidity unacceptable sources of protection. The control of inflation is only one of the problems facing a government wishing to encourage rapid economic development. The fight against illiteracy, the reform of bureaucratic practices, the building of basic sanitary facilities for the eradication of endemic diseases, the substitution of competitive for monopolistic trade practices, the encouragement of a widespread spirit of entrepreneurship, and the creation of an adequate amount of social capital, may be important prerequisites for rapid growth.

Download or read book Interest and Prices written by Michael Woodford and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-12 with total page 805 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, any pretense of a connection of the world's currencies to any real commodity has been abandoned. Yet since the 1980s, most central banks have abandoned money-growth targets as practical guidelines for monetary policy as well. How then can pure "fiat" currencies be managed so as to create confidence in the stability of national units of account? Interest and Prices seeks to provide theoretical foundations for a rule-based approach to monetary policy suitable for a world of instant communications and ever more efficient financial markets. In such a world, effective monetary policy requires that central banks construct a conscious and articulate account of what they are doing. Michael Woodford reexamines the foundations of monetary economics, and shows how interest-rate policy can be used to achieve an inflation target in the absence of either commodity backing or control of a monetary aggregate. The book further shows how the tools of modern macroeconomic theory can be used to design an optimal inflation-targeting regime--one that balances stabilization goals with the pursuit of price stability in a way that is grounded in an explicit welfare analysis, and that takes account of the "New Classical" critique of traditional policy evaluation exercises. It thus argues that rule-based policymaking need not mean adherence to a rigid framework unrelated to stabilization objectives for the sake of credibility, while at the same time showing the advantages of rule-based over purely discretionary policymaking.

Download or read book The Costs and Benefits of Price Stability written by Martin Feldstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the Federal Reserve and central banks worldwide have enjoyed remarkable success in their battle against inflation. The challenge now confronting the Fed and its counterparts is how to proceed in this newly benign economic environment: Should monetary policy seek to maintain a rate of low-level inflation or eliminate inflation altogether in an effort to attain full price stability? In a seminal article published in 1997, Martin Feldstein developed a framework for calculating the gains in economic welfare that might result from a move from a low level of inflation to full price stability. The present volume extends that analysis, focusing on the likely costs and benefits of achieving price stability not only in the United States, but in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom as well. The results show that even small changes in already low inflation rates can have a substantial impact on the economic performance of different countries, and that variations in national tax rules can affect the level of gain from disinflation.

Download or read book Exchange Rate Dynamics Redux written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until now, thinking on open economy macroeconomics has been largely schizophrenic. When it comes to analyzing exchange rate dynamics, an empirically-minded economist abandons modern current account models which, while theoretically coherent, fail to address the awkward reality of sticky nominal prices. In this paper we develop an analytically tractable two-country model that marries a full account of dynamics to a supply framework based on monopolistic competition and sticky prices. It offers simple and intuitive predictions about exchange rates and current accounts that sometimes differ sharply from those of either modern flexible-price intertemporal models, or traditional sticky-price Keynesian models. The model also leads to a novel perspective on the international welfare spillovers of monetary and fiscal policies.