Capital Mobility and Monetary Policy: An Overview

While the global economic environment has changed considerably from end-2011 to the present for advanced and emerging economies alike, the themes and policy issues addressed by these papers share a timeless dimension. Collectively, the studies that comprise this volume deal with various aspects of the causes, consequences, and policy challenges associated with the repeated boom-bust cycles that have characterized market economies throughout most of their history. The papers have a decided open-economy focus and connect the prosperity-crisis-depression cycle to international capital flows and their impact on domestic and external indebtedness, currency fluctuations, and the banking sector; their connection to global factors, such as international interest rates, commodity prices and crises or turbulence outside the national borders is explored. While the analysis is tilted towards emerging markets—particularly in Latin America, the relevance of these topics for mature economies has been made plain by the Global Financial Crisis.