A number of industrialized countries have recently offered inflation-indexed bonds. Some members of another group of countries that had earlier adopted more comprehensive indexation in response to high inflation have taken steps to reduce the scope of indexation in their economies. This paper surveys debt management, monetary policy, and welfare arguments on the use of inflation-indexed bonds, and relates these to the experiences of various issuers. The paper also considers some important design features of indexed bonds.

The global market for inflation-indexed securities has ballooned in recent years, and this trend is set to continue. This book examines the rationale behind issuance and investment decisions, and details the issues facing anyone who designs indexed securities, illustrating them wherever possible with actual examples from the international capital markets. In particular, an extensive review of indexed debt markets throughout the world is provided - including for the first time, a comprehensive and consistent set of cash flow and price-yield equations for the instruments already in existence in the major bond markets - forming an important reference for those already experienced in the field, as well as practitioners and academics approaching the subject for the first time. The book also provides unique insight into the development of inflation-indexed derivative products, and the analytical tools required to value such instruments.

Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

This book provides some of the most recent developments in Computational Intelligence applied to business and economics presented at the MS'10 International Conference, Barcelona, 15 17 July, 2010. It presents several new theoretical advancements and a wide range of applications in different business and economic areas including accounting, finance, management, marketing, sports, tourism, economics and politics, and also some applications related with engineering and modeling and simulation. This book is very useful for researchers and graduate students interested in pursuing research in business and economics with an orientation to modern techniques for dealing with uncertainty such as those related with modeling and simulation and computational intelligence.

This book brings together the experience of central banks and national statistical agencies in countries that focus their monetary policy on inflation targets. Inflation targeting has led to a close interface between these two sets of institutions. When the performance of a central bank is measured in terms of specified price indices, which are usually compiled and disseminated by the national statistical agency, the role of national statistical agencies becomes central to the credibility of monetary policy. Data needs and uses have also shifted, with implications for national and international statistics compilation: market data have gained in importance; less emphasis is placed on traditional monetary aggregates; and greater attention is paid to timeliness, adherence to sound economic accounting standards, and other aspects of data quality.

This handbook is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for both senior policymakers—those responsible for the development of government bond markets in their own countries—and all individuals responsible for guiding the market development process at the operational level—those who have a substantial need to understand the policy issues involved.

In their effort to finance fiscal deficits at a reasonable cost, governments compete with other users of financial capital. Governments, however, are in the unique position that they are the only debt suppliers that can determine the taxation of debt instruments they issue. Following an overview of the current tax treatment of government bonds in OECD countries, this paper argues that—on purely economic grounds—there are no reasons for exempting interest on government bonds. Administrative difficulties in capturing interest on many other debt instruments in the tax net may, however, provide a rationale for doing so.