Over the past decade policy makers in Latin America have adopted a number of macroprudential instruments to manage the procyclicality of bank credit dynamics to the private sector and contain systemic risk. Reserve requirements, in particular, have been actively employed. Despite their widespread use, little is known about their effectiveness and how they interact with monetary policy. In this paper, we examine the role of reserve requirements and other macroprudential instruments and report new cross-country evidence on how they influence real private bank credit growth. Our results show that these instruments have a moderate and transitory effect and play a complementary role to monetary policy.

Over the past decade policy makers in Latin America have adopted a number of macroprudential instruments to manage the procyclicality of bank credit dynamics to the private sector and contain systemic risk. Reserve requirements, in particular, have been actively employed. Despite their widespread use, little is known about their effectiveness and how they interact with monetary policy. In this paper, we examine the role of reserve requirements and other macroprudential instruments and report new cross-country evidence on how they influence real private bank credit growth. Our results show that these instruments have a moderate and transitory effect and play a complementary role to monetary policy.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, it is hard to find any macroeconomic policy report that does not include some reference to financial stability or systemic risk and the resulting need for “macroprudential policies.” While there is a large and growing literature on macroprudential policies and financial stability, less attention has been paid to how macroprudential policies may facilitate macroeconomic stabilization in the presence of large capital flows. To fill such a gap, this report looks at the use of reserve requirements (RR) as a macroprudential tool. Its findings should be of particular interest to emerging market economists and policymakers that are faced with difficult questions regarding how to cope effectively with volatile capital flows. The analysis builds upon a new dataset on quarterly RR covering a large number of industrial and developing countries for the period 1970-2011. It finds that while no industrial country has resorted to active RR policy since 2004, almost half of developing countries have. Indeed, together with interest rates adjustments and forex interventions, RR seem to be an important component of a trio of policy instruments that developing countries have relied upon to navigate through the boom-bust cycles driven by capital flows. The ultimate reason for resorting to RR lies essentially on the procyclical behavior of the exchange rate over the business cycle in developing countries (with the currency depreciating in bad times and appreciating in good times) that complicates enormously the use of interest rates as a countercyclical instrument. Under such circumstances, RR are an effective instrument that can be used countercyclically when concerns about the effects of interest rates on the exchange rate become paramount. Finally, the report suggests that while, from a macroprudential point of view, the most common macroprudential instruments are equivalent, from a microprudential one they are not. Conflicts may thus arise between the micro- and macro-prudential policy stances. In addition, the overall design of macroprudential policies should follow a careful analysis of the role that different financial frictions play in various environments since similar symptoms can reflect very different underlying forces.

This paper provides a brief historical journey of central banking in Latin America to shed light on the debate about monetary policy in the post-global financial crisis period. The paper distinguishes three periods in Latin America’s central bank history: the early years, when central banks endorsed the gold standard and coped with the collapse of this monetary system; a second period, in which central banks turned into development banks under the aegis of governments at the expense of increasing inflation; and the “golden years,” when central banks succeeded in preserving price stability in an environment of political independence. The paper concludes by cautioning against overburdening central banks in Latin America with multiple mandates as this could end up undermining their hard-won monetary policy credibility.

The countercyclical capital buffer (CCB) was proposed by the Basel committee to increase the resilience of the banking sector to negative shocks. The interactions between banking sector losses and the real economy highlight the importance of building a capital buffer in periods when systemic risks are rising. Basel III introduces a framework for a time-varying capital buffer on top of the minimum capital requirement and another time-invariant buffer (the conservation buffer). The CCB aims to make banks more resilient against imbalances in credit markets and thereby enhance medium-term prospects of the economy—in good times when system-wide risks are growing, the regulators could impose the CCB which would help the banks to withstand losses in bad times.

This note provides guidance to facilitate the staff’s advice on macroprudential policy in Fund surveillance. It elaborates on the principles set out in the “Key Aspects of Macroprudential Policy,” taking into account the work of international standard setters as well as the evolving country experience with macroprudential policy. The main note is accompanied by supplements offering Detailed Guidance on Instruments and Considerations for Low Income Countries

The paper proposes a simple, new, analytical framework for assessing the cost and benefits of macroprudential policies. It proposes a measure of net benefits in terms of parameters that can be estimated: the probability of crisis, the loss in output given crisis, policy effectiveness in bringing down both the probability and damage during crisis, and the output-cost of a policy decision. It discusses three types of policy leakages and identifies instruments that could best minimize the leakages. Some rules of thumb for policymakers are provided.