Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.

This paper focuses on the developing countries, which accounted for nearly half the value of those surpluses, were apparently unable to find sufficiently profitable investments at home that overcame market and political risk. The United States a decade ago likely could not have run up today’s near $800 billion annual deficit for the simple reason that we could not have attracted the foreign savings to finance it. In 1995, for example, total cross-border saving was less than $300 billion. The long-term updrift in this broader swath of unconsolidated deficits and mostly offsetting surpluses of economic entities has been persistent but gradual for decades, probably generations. However, the component of that broad set that captures only the net foreign financing of the imbalances of the individual US economic entities, our current account deficit, increased from negligible in the early 1990s to 6.2 percent of our GDP by 2006.

Written by Margaret Garritsen de Vries, former Historian of the IMF, the book describes the policies and activities the IMF has pursued in helping members achieve balane of payments adjustment. Separate treatment is given to industrial and developing countries, since their balance of payments problems have differed. As examples, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Colombia, and Mexico as discussed.

This paper presents a study to review fluctuations in Japan’s balance of payments and the role of short-term capital flows. Based on annual data, it appears that Japan has passed through two additional cycles after the 1952-55 and 1955-58 cycles covered by Narvekar's studies. In general, the annual data show clearly that the flows of short-term capital have tended to fluctuate in a direction opposite to that of the fluctuations in the basic balance of payments. Thus, the short-term capital inflow increased substantially as the basic surplus fell sharply from 1959 to 1960 and increased further still as the basic balance went into heavy deficit in 1961. Short-term capital flows helped to moderate the fluctuations in Japan's over-all balance of payments, compared with the fluctuations in its basic balance, and thus played an anticyclical role in Japan's balance of payments during 1959–1966. During 1965, the basic balance showed a small deficit in the first quarter, a small surplus in the second quarter, and large surpluses in the third and fourth quarters. This review of monetary policy changes indicates an intimate relationship between changes in Japanese monetary policy and fluctuations in Japan's basic balance of payments during 1959–1966.