How does fiscal policy affect monetary policy in the Southern African Community (SADC)?

Fiscal policy can affect monetary policy either through debt monetisation or through a direct effect on price dynamics. The former is the conventional classical view rooted in the quantity theory of money while the latter is the modern view of the Fiscal Theory of Price Determination. Based on the dynamic response of inflation to different shocks, we test the relationship between fiscal balances and monetary stability in 10 SADC countries. Results show that five out of 10 countries considered here were characterised throughout the period 1980-2006 by fiscally dominant regimes, with weak or no response of primary surpluses to public liabilities. The remaining five countries exhibit a monetary dominant regime. The study also finds that changes in primary surpluses affect price variability via aggregate demand, suggesting that fiscal outcomes could be a direct source of inflation variability, hence, the need for policy coordination in the region.African Economic Integration, Fiscal Monetary Policy Coordination, VAR Analysis.

Inflation Targets as Focal Points

In a world characterised by noisy information and conflicting signals, no Central Bank is always able to affect private sector expectations. Based on Morris and Shin's model, monetary policy then becomes an information game, in which individuals form their expectations based on all the information that is available to them (public and private). However individual agents also know that ultimately inflation is affected by both the objectives of the Central Bank (and hence the policies it pursues) as well as the average expectation formed by the all agents. They thus need to evaluate both actions. Central to our argument is the way that individuals interpret these actions to form their expectations. We apply Bacharach's methodology to provide a framework for assessing everyone's interpretations. Our contribution is to merge these two models to show that a monetary policy regime that has explicit quantitative objectives may provide individuals with better anchors for expectations to coordinate at. However, that is only true first, if no great shocks are anticipated to hit the economy and second, when all other public information is very unclear thus rendering the inflation target the only clear piece of information. We derive in detail the conditions under which this is true.

Dynamic Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks in Malawi

This paper sets out to investigate the process through which monetary policy affects economic activity in Malawi. Using innovation accounting in a structural vector autoregressive model, it is established that monetary authorities in Malawi employ hybrid operating procedures and pursue both price stability and high growth and employment objectives. Two operating targets of monetary policy are identified, viz., bank rate and reserve money, and it is demonstrated that the former is a more effective measure of monetary policy than the latter. The study also illustrates that bank lending, exchange rates and aggregate money supply contain important additional information in the transmission process of monetary policy shocks in Malawi. Furthermore, it is shown that the floatation of the Malawi Kwacha in February 1994 had considerable effects on the country’s monetary transmission process. In the post-1994 period, the role of exchange rates became more conspicuous than before although its impact was weakened; and the importance of aggregate money supply and bank lending in transmitting monetary policy impulses was enhanced. Overall, the monetary transmission process evolved from a weak, blurred process to a somewhat strong, less ambiguous mechanism.

A Measure for Credibility: Tracking US Monetary Developments

Our objective is to identify a way of checking empirically the extent to which expectations are de-coupled from inflation, how well they might be anchored in the long run, and at what level. This methodology allows us then to identify a measure for the degree of anchorness, and as anchored expectations are associated with credibility, this will serve as a proxy for credibility. We apply this methodology to the US history of inflation since 1963 and examine how well our measure tracks the periods for which credibility is known to be either low or high. Of particular interest to the validity of the measure is the start of the Great Moderation. Following the narrative of a number of well documented incidents in this period, we check how well our measure captures both the evolution of credibility in US monetary policy, as well as reactions to inflation scares.Great Inflation, Great Moderation, Anchors for Expectations

Anchors for Inflation Expectations

We identify credible monetary policy with first, a disconnect between inflation and inflation expectations and second, the anchoring of the latter at the inflation target announced by the monetary authorities. We test empirically whether this is the case for a number of countries that have an explicit inflation target and therefore include the Euro Area. We find that for the last 10 year period, the two series are less dependent on each other and that announcing inflation targets help anchor expectations at the right level.Inflation Targets, Measures of Credibility

L'Imposta Regionale sulle Attività Produttive: profili sistematici ed evolutivi

Dall'introduzione dell'imposta regionale sulle attività produttive, alle prime critiche relative alla non conformità con il principio di capacità contributiva, fino al recente orientamento della Corte di Cassazione

EFFICACIA DELL'ANESTESIA PLESSICA NELLA PROTESI TOTALE DI GINOCCHIO

L'anestesia loco regionale ha vissuto un periodo di enorme sviluppo in questi ultimi decenni, specialmente nell'ambito della chirurgia ortopedica. L'elevato grado di sicurezza e la migliore analgesia offerta da tale tecnica ha consolidato il proprio ruolo nel far fronte alla crescente richiesta di prestazione chirurgiche anche da effettuare in regime di day hospital

A Theory of Colonial Governance

This paper considers conditions of optimality in a co-optive strategy of colonial rule. It proposes a simple model of elite formation emanating from a coloniser's quest to maximise extracted rents from its colonies. The results suggest multiple optimal solutions, depending on the specification of the production function, the governance technology chosen by the coloniser and the technological parameters of the model. For instance, in agrarian colonial societies, the results suggest that under a technology of governance by numbers, a large elite population is a direct reflection of a high productivity-enhancing technology by the coloniser. In contrast, under a governance technology by quality, the better the productivity-enhancing technology, the lower the quality of human capital that is transferred to the elite. Additionally, under a composite governance technology, and given non-linearity conditions defined by the productivity distance threshold, the better the productivity-enhancing technology, the smaller the optimal elite size that is chosen by the coloniser. An alternative set of results is obtained assuming an industrial economic set-up (or interdependent production). These results suggest that the long debate about the apparent superiority of one European colonisation experience over the other is much more intricate than is often perceived in the literature. The insight from the model is also useful in understanding why the stock of human capital available in countries emerging from colonisation varied considerably across colonial experiences and from one country to another.Optimality Conditions, Governance technology, human capital, elite, productivity

El consumo de tabaco en Italia y el papel de la European Respiratory Society

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