Exchange rate regimes and real exchange rate volatility: Does inflation targeting help or hurt?

This paper revisits the comparison of the effects of inflation targeters versus hard fixers and intermediate exchange rate regimes. In particular, we are interested in exploring the impact of inflation targeting (IT) on real effective exchange rate (REER) volatility for a panel of 62 developing countries over the period 2006–2012. We also analyze the impact of IT regimes on REER in terms of its two component parts, i.e. relative tradable prices across countries as well as sectoral prices of tradables and nontradables within countries. The paper accounts for self-selection concerns regarding policy adoption and examines the effects of commodity exports and foreign exchange intervention. Notably, IT regimes seem to have experienced greater REER volatility, largely driven by external prices in developed countries. For developing countries, IT regimes show no difference in REER volatility, though there is some evidence that they have lower volatility in internal prices.     

The Relationship Between Price Stability and Financial Stability: Evidence From Major Emerging Economies

We examine the relationship between price stability and financial stability for major emerging economies using a Markov regime-switching model. Empirical results suggest that monetary policy is consistent with the Taylor rule in all countries except for India and all countries followed both low and high inflation targeting monetary policy regimes. Low inflation targeting regime seems to be more persistent and has higher duration than high inflation targeting regimes except for Indonesia and South Africa. All countries seem to have had financial stability concerns when they formulated their monetary policy as the coefficient of the financial stress index is statistically significant at least in one regime. Overall the results suggest that Taylor rule-based monetary policies have been implemented to various degrees in major emerging economies to achieve economic stability, price stability, and financial stability.     

Terms of Trade Shocks and Inflation Targeting in Emerging Market Economies

Emerging market economies (EMEs) have persistently experienced different waves of commodity terms of trade disturbances, generating macroeconomic instabilities. The adoption of inflation targeting (IT) by many EMEs has raised questions about its relative suitability in dealing with these shocks compared with other monetary policy regimes. This paper tests the robustness of IT compared with monetary targeting and exchange rate targeting regimes in coping with commodity terms of trade shocks using the panel vector autoregressive technique. The results show that in general, IT countries respond better to commodity terms of trade shocks especially with respect to inflation and output gap. However, exchange rates are more volatile in IT countries than in exchange rate targeting countries. The results suggest that EME countries can reduce the adverse effects of commodity terms of trade fluctuations when they adopt IT, but they also need to pay attention to exchange rate movements.     

Exchange rates,price levels,and inflation targeting: Evidence from Asian countries

This study examines how the adoption of inflation-targeting influenced exchange rate pass-through and volatility in four Asian countries –Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand – over the sample period of January 1990 to June 2007. We find that adopting inflation targeting helped reduce pass-through in South Korea, and Thailand, while the results are less clear for Indonesia and the Philippines. Nevertheless, the findings indicate that inflation targeting caused a decline in exchange rate volatility in all four countries. The important lesson from the experiences of these Asian countries is that the adoption of inflation targeting contributes to achieving the ultimate goal of inflation stability through reducing exchange rate pass-through or variability.     

Targeting Rules for an Open Economy

This study extends the formal analysis of inflation targeting monetary policy using the standard New Keynesian framework to a small open economy by adding inflation and output persistence as well as a direct exchange rate channel to domestic inflation. We find that output variability is lower under CPI inflation targeting than under domestic inflation targeting. However, CPI inflation results in higher variability of the real exchange rate than domestic inflation targeting. Output and the nominal interest rate are less volatile under flexible inflation targeting than under almost-strict inflation targeting. We also find that almost-strict domestic inflation targeting cannot completely insulate domestic inflation from foreign shocks due to a direct exchange rate channel. The model is calibrated to Canadian data.     

What Makes Currencies Volatile? An Empirical Investigation

Real effective exchange rate volatility is examined for 90 countries using monthly data from January 1990 to June 2006. Volatility decreases with openness to international trade and per capita GDP, and increases with inflation, particularly under a horizontal peg or band, and with terms-of-trade volatility. The choice of exchange rate regime matters. After controlling for these effects, an independent float adds at least 45% to the standard deviation of the real effective exchange rate, relative to a conventional peg, but most other regimes make little difference. The results are robust to alternative volatility measures and to sample selection bias.     

Inflation Targeting and Relative Price Variability: What Difference Does Inflation Targeting Make?

This article studies the effects of inflation targeting (IT) on relative price variability (RPV) using a data set of twenty countries comprising both targeters and nontargeters. We find that a decline in mean inflation after IT adoption is not necessarily associated with a similar fall in RPV and that what matters most for the structural changes in RPV is the initial inflation regime prior to the adoption of IT rather than IT adoption itself. IT adoption impacts the shape of the underlying relationship between inflation and RPV in countries with initially high inflation rates, moving it from monotonic to the U‐shaped profile observed consistently for countries with low‐inflation regimes. The minimum point of this U‐shaped curve is indicative of the public's expectations of inflation and is very close to the announced target for inflation in most of the countries we study.     

ISOLATING A MEASURE OF INFLATION EXPECTATIONS FOR THE SOUTH AFRICAN FINANCIAL MARKET USING FORWARD INTEREST RATES

The inflation expectations channel of the transmission mechanism is generally recognised as crucial for the implementation of modern monetary policy. This paper briefly reviews the practices commonly employed for measuring inflation expectations in South Africa, and offers an additional method, which is market based. The methodologies of Nelson and Siegel and Svensson are applied to determine implied nominal and real forward interest rates. The difference between the nominal and real forward rates (called inflation compensation) on a particular day is then used as a proxy for the market's inflation expectations. This measure should not be viewed as a substitute for other measures of inflation expectations, but should rather supplement these in order to offer an additional insight.     

Optimal Exchange Intervention in an Inflation Targeting Regime: Some Cautionary Tales

Devaluations and fiscal retrenchments coming from developed countries are buffeting less developed countries. Many emerging market countries have adopted inflation targeting as “best practice,” but now they are being advised to enhance their inflation targeting regimes with foreign exchange intervention. Here we use a DSGE model to tell some cautionary tales about this advice. A Taylor rule guides interest rate setting, while foreign exchange interventions are used as a second tool of monetary policy. These interventions are effective in our model since domestic and key currency bonds are imperfect substitutes. We derive optimal (Ramsey) intervention policies in response to foreign devaluations and fiscal retrenchments, and find that they are rather complex. So, we compare the optimal responses to policies that simply smooth real or nominal exchange rate movements. Our results suggest that discretion may be the better part of valor: pure inflation targeting may come closer to the optimal policy than exchange rate smoothing. A secondary result may also be of some interest: foreign exchange interventions have a stronger impact on inflation and output in an inflation targeting regime than do sterilized interventions; the Taylor rule augments the effects of a given intervention.     

Exchange Rate Pass-through,Unemployment and Optimal Implementable Monetary Policy Rule for Emerging Economies

Abstract

This paper develops a small open economy model with nominal rigidities and search-matching frictions to study the implications of exchange rate pass-through for monetary policy in emerging countries. I find that, with complete exchange rate pass-through, the optimal policy rule features unemployment targeting as well as inflation targeting. However, the welfare gain from responding to unemployment fluctuations diminishes as the rate of exchange rate pass-through to import prices decreases. With low exchange rate pass-through, the optimal monetary policy is strict inflation targeting.     

Monetary Convergence and Risk Premiums in the EU Accession Countries

This study examines the impact of various monetary policy regimes on the ability to lower inflation and exchange rate risk premiums in the EU accession countries as they undergo monetary convergence to the eurozone. It proposes a monetary policy framework of flexible targeting of relative inflation risk premium that is believed to be credible and useful for managing these two categories of risk. A model of inflation and exchange rate risk premiums within the context of inflation targeting is developed. Recent trends in these risk premiums in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland are tested by employing the threshold ARCH (TARCH) model.     

Monetary Policy Implementation and Volatility Transmission Along the Yield Curve: The Case of Kenya

This paper analyses the degree to which volatility in interbank interest rates leads to volatility in financial instruments with longer maturities (e.g. T‐bills) in Kenya since 2012, year in which the monetary policy framework switched to a forward‐looking approach, relative to seven other inflation targeting (IT) countries (Ghana, Hungary, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand and Uganda). Kenya shows strong volatility transmission and high persistence similar to other countries in transition to a more forwardlooking monetary policy framework. These results emphasize the importance of a strong commitment to an interbank rate as an operational target and suggest that the central bank could reduce uncertainty in short‐term yields significantly by smoothing out the overnight interest rates around the policy rate.     

Inflation Targeting in ASEAN‐10

The paper addresses the empirical question of whether economies that do not systematically target inflation (non‐inflation targeters) experience higher exchange rate volatility as compared with inflation targeters in 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) from 1990 to 2010. The paper examines the role of real exchange rate, exchange rate volatility and the reaction functions of central banks using dynamic panel estimation techniques. The results indicate that the output gap offers more useful information than the inflation gap in setting interest rates for inflation targeters, implying that the real term is more important than the nominal term. In turn, this suggests that an increase in interest rate can be wielded swiftly to reduce real gross domestic product and suppress inflation. The real exchange rate appears as a weaker determinant in setting interest rates for non‐inflation targeters. Inflation targeters experienced lower exchange rate volatility compared with non‐targeters in the ASEAN, which implies that implementation costs to their domestic economies may be marginally lower. Meanwhile, the non‐targeters follow a mixed strategy as both the inflation and real exchange rate are used as instruments to set the interest rates.     

Inflation and Market Uncertainty in South Africa

Comparison of the movements in the VIX index, the rand – dollar exchange rate and South African CPI inflation reveals a striking resemblance between them, raising the question as to whether or not there is an empirical relationship among them. The aim of this paper is to determine whether or not changes in market uncertainty, as reflected in the VIX index, influence South African inflation. Given that the VIX index reflects market uncertainty, its impact on the inflation rate may differ between times of heightened uncertainty and normality, thus suggesting the presence of multiple regimes. To cater for this possibility, the analysis first uses the general‐to‐specific procedure (including squared and cubed values of dependent and independent variables) with impulse indicator saturation dummies to look for non‐linear behaviour in the form of statistically significant squared and cubed variables and clustered periods of outlier dummies that might reflect an alternative regime. Finding such periods, the analysis next uses a Markov‐switching model to model this non‐linear behaviour explicitly. The results show that market volatility as measured by the VIX indeed explains South African inflation. Moreover, as shown by the second regime of the Markov‐switching model, when market volatility is elevated, its influence on inflation also increases.     

Understanding the inflation–output nexus for China

In this article we examine several hypotheses relating to output and inflation dynamics in China. The hypotheses tests are based on the exponential generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (EGARCH) model of Nelson [Nelson, D. (1991). Conditional heteroskedasticity in asset return: A new approach, Econometrica, 59, 347–370]. Our findings suggest that Chinese output–inflation behaviour is consistent with the hypothesis that increased inflation uncertainty lowers average inflation; the hypothesis that inflation volatility reduces economic growth and the hypothesis that higher output volatility increases economic growth. However, we find no support for the hypothesis that higher output volatility increases the average inflation rate.     

Effectiveness of history-dependent monetary policy

In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of history-dependent monetary policy, focusing on the design of targeting regimes and simple policy rules. Our quantitative analysis is based on a small estimated forward-looking model of the Japanese economy with a hybrid Phillips curve. Our main findings are: (1) History-dependent targeting regimes, such as price level targeting and income growth targeting, outperform inflation targeting; (2) Committing to a simple history-dependent policy rule results in nearly the same social welfare as the optimal delegation of price level targeting and income growth targeting; (3) The central bank can achieve almost the same performance as the optimal commitment policy by adopting the first difference hybrid policy rule in which the change in interest rate responds to inflation, output gap, and real income growth rate. J. Japanese Int. Economies 18 (3) (2004) 330–361.     

资产价格波动差异:由股市与房价观察

我国股票市场和住宅市场的市盈率与货币幻觉代理变量通货膨胀率、名义利率呈现明显的反向关系,即在高通胀时,市场被低估;在低通胀时,市场被高估。通货膨胀通过货币幻觉,影响资产估值高低。股市的市盈率波动幅度远大于住宅市场,股票价格波动主要来自估值倍数变化;而住宅的估值倍数波动小,房价波动更多地受到了估值倍数与租金变化的综合影响。     

The Impact of Political Instability on Inflation Volatility in Africa

This paper investigates whether political instability leads to volatile inflation using a panel of 49 African countries. The study uses novel measures of political instability, particularly the state failure index and state fragility index. In the field of political instability and inflation volatility, this is the first study to measure inflation volatility as the conditional variance of inflation estimated from GARCH (1, 1) model. Adopting the system‐generalized method of moments estimator for linear dynamic panel models for the sample period 1985‐2009, the study documents a positive statistically significant effect of political instability on inflation volatility.     

Price Stability and the Case for Flexible Exchange Rates

We revisit Friedman’s case for flexible exchange rates in a small open economy with several distortions and rigidities and a variety of domestic and external shocks. We find that, for external shocks, the flexible exchange rate regime outperforms the fixed regime independent of the source of domestic nominal rigidities provided that the monetary authorities pursue a policy of strict inflation targeting. For domestic supply shocks, a joint policy of a flexible exchange rate and strict inflation targeting fares well when the main source of nominal rigidities is in the domestic goods markets, but not if rigidities arise in the labor markets.