A number of authors have developed varied indices for measuring central bank independence with the aim of determining whether there is any association between central bank independence and inflation rates. Most analyses focused on industrialized countries, although more recently the interest has shifted to the emerging and less developed countries. The general trust of the results of these stud...

We demonstrate the existence of chaos in realistic models of two-field inflation. The chaotic motion takes place after the end of inflation, when the fields are free to oscillate and their motion is only lightly damped by the expansion of the universe. We then investigate whether the presence of chaos affects the predictions of two-field models, and show that chaos enhances the production of to...

The paper shows that Liquidity Deflation, a liquidity-drainage mechanism associated with Safe Asset Shortage, helps to rationalize supply-side liquidity trap and involuntary unemployment under wage/price flexibility, especially in economies that suffered massive liquidity destruction, like advanced economies in the wake of the Lehman crisis. Moreover, Liquidity Deflation is shown to imply defla...

This paper focuses on how inflation interacts with taxes and interest rates to affect capital formation.1 It uses a simple credit-market framework to explain how inflation magnifies the distorting effects of taxation when the tax treatment of interest income and expense is not fully indexed to inflation.2 The distortion involves a real tax wedge consisting of the difference between the real int...

Recent increases in pathology costs per scheme member are a concern to medical schemes and pathologists alike. To better understand the observed increasing costs, the National Pathology Group commissioned Prognosys to analyse the trends affecting these increases. We found that these increases are driven by inflation, increases in utilisation, and redistribution of the burden of cost. The identi...

“Optimal fiscal and monetary policy with commitment” is a policy of choosing taxes and transfers or monetary instruments to maximize social welfare. “Commitment” refers to ability of a policymaker to make binding policy choices. Optimal fiscal policy under commitment Ramsey approach to the optimal taxation “Ramsey approach to optimal taxation” is a solution to the problem of choosing optimal ta...

While the incidence of extreme poverty fell dramatically in China over 1980–2001, progress was uneven over time and across provinces. Rural areas accounted for the bulk of the gains to the poor, though migration to urban areas helped. Rural economic growth was far more important to national poverty reduction than urban economic growth; agriculture played a far more important role than the secon...

A prominent policy issue of the 1970s and one that seems certain to dominate the early 1980s is the appropriate response to a prevailing high rate of inflation. The view that there is a long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment, widely accepted at the end of the sixties, is now held by only a small minority of economists. It is still widely believed, however, that there is a short-r...

We inspect how inflation target announcements are instrumental in building central bank credibility and shaping the public’s inflation expectations. Investigating the role of announcements in two early adopters of inflation targeting by using a time varying credibility measure, we find that both the accuracy and the frequency of inflation announcements have a positive impact on how much attenti...

The performance of tax receipts in Italy during the period 1978-2006 is analysed through the relationship between the growth of revenue and the evolution of the macroeconomic framework. Series of actual tax receipts are adjusted to take account of discretionary measures, transformed into implicit tax rates, and then broken down into the structural components. A regression analysis of the trend ...