Monetary Policy and Exchange Rate Regimes: Options for the Middle East examines some of the most pressing issues facing policymakers today. The authors offer answers to such questions as: Are the choices of exchange rate regime limited to hard fixing or fully floating? Are capital flight and banking crises avoidable? What is the best way to coordinate monetary and fiscal policies? The answers to these questions draw on the vast literature available on these topics as well as the lessons learned from recent crises, especially in East Asia and Latin America. Beside its broad coverage, this volume includes rich analyses on specific countries of the Middle East. It merits a wide readership, but policymakers seeking to achieve macroeconomic stability and growth will find it particularly useful.

This first issue of IMF Staff Papers for 2005 contains 7 papers that discuss: whether output recovered after the Asian crisis; the value of a country's trading partners to its own economic growth; whether interdependence is a factor in understanding the spread of currency crises; can remittance payments from expatriates be a reliable source of capital for economic development?; total factor productivity; designing a VAT for the energy trade in Russia and Ukraine; and lastly, a discussion of the reasons for central bank intervention in ERM-I since 1993

In the aftermath of the Asian/global financial crises of 1997-98, how should emerging markets now structure their exchange rate systems to prevent new crises from occurring? This study challenges current orthodoxy by advocating the revival of intermediate exchange rate regimes. In so doing, Williamson presents a reasoned challenge to the new prevailing attitude which claims that all countries involved in the international capital markets need to polarize to one of the extreme regimes (to a fixed rate with either a currency board or dollarization, or to a lightly-managed float). He concludes that although there is some truth in the allegation that intermediate regimes are vulnerable to speculative crises, they still offer offsetting advantages. He also contends that it would be possible to redesign them to be more flexible so as to reduce their vulnerability to crises.

El objetivo de este trabajo es proporcionar una introduccion informal a las herramientas del analisis de series temporales y a los conceptos necesarios para comprender la metodologia basica en la que se fundamenta la aplicacion de filtros. El trabajo esta dirigido a analistas en general que realicen trabajos aplicados en este campo, pero que no hayan cursado un modulo avanzado de analisis aplicado de series temporales. Se ha puesto especial enfasis en el metodo basado en modelos, aunque gran parte del material tambien puede aplicarse al uso de filtros 'ad-hoc'. La estructura basica consiste en modelizar la serie como un proceso estocastico lineal y estimar los componentes mediante la 'extraccion de una señal', es decir, mediante la estimacion optima de componentes generados por modelos estadisticos bien definidos.(am) (ad).