Countries with evolving monetary regimes that decide to embark on "the Journey to inflation targeting" may not be able to adopt a full-fledged inflation targeting regime immediately. Those countries would be better off adopting transitional arrangements that take advantage of the informational content of monetary aggregates, developing an economic analysis capacity, and concentrating on monetay operations aimed at steering money market interest rates. This approach would allow the central bank to buy time for developing the building blocks for effective monetary policy, support transparent central bank communication, and limit the potential for undesirable outcomes along the road.

The extensive 1980's deregulation of New Zealand financial markets is exploited to provide a unique test of capital structure theory. Specifically, debt choices of New Zealand corporate firms during pre-reform (1982-1985) and post-reform (1986-1989) periods are analysed and compared. However, consistent with evidence from other countries, existing hypotheses are able to explain relatively little of the cross-sectional variation in either long- or short-term debt usage. More significantly, this lack of explanatory power is consistent across pre- and post-reform periods.

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