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Monetary policy rules for an open economy

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Abstract

The most popular simple rule for the interest rate, due to Taylor (1993a) is meant to inform monetary policy in economies that are closed. On the other hand, its main open economy alternative, i.e. Ball's (1999) rule based on a Monetary Conditions Index (MCI), may perform poorly in the face of specific types of exchange rate shocks and thus cannot offer guidance for the day-to-day conduct of monetary policy. In this paper we specify and evaluate a comprehensive set of simple monetary policy rules that are suitable for small open economies in general, and for the United Kingdom in particular. We do so by examining the performance of a battery of simple rules, including the familiar Taylor rule and MCI-based rules a la Ball. This entails comparing the asymptotic properties of a two-sector open-economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model calibrated on United Kingdom data under different rules. We find that an inflation forecast based rule ('IFB'), i.e. a rule that reacts to deviations of expected inflation from target, is a good simple rule in this respect, when the horizon is adequately chosen. Adding a separate response to the level of the real exchange rate (contemporaneous and lagged) appears to reduce the difference in adjustment between output gaps in the two sectors of the economy, but the improvement is only marginal. Importantly, an IFB rule, with or without exchange rate adjustment, appears robust to different shocks, in contrast to naive or Ball's MCI-based rules.

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  • Nicoletta Batini & Richard Harrison & Stephen Millard, 2001. "Monetary policy rules for an open economy," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issue mar.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedfpr:y:2001:i:mar:x:6
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