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.

Many sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries liberalized their economies in the 1980s and early 1990s. This paper reviews the foreign exchange regime reforms in selected SSA, and their associated macroeconomic policies and economic performance during and after these reforms were undertaken. Before liberalization, most of the reviewed countries were characterized by extensive foreign exchange rationing, sizeable black market premiums, and declining per capita real income. Today, the countries that successfully reformed look markedly different. Rationing and parallel market spreads are a distant memory, and per capita income has increased sharply.

This paper addresses the question of how to record mobile phone license payments in the national accounts. It concludes that there are usually two assets involved with mobile phone licenses: the spectrum, which is owned by the government, and the license, which is an intangible nonproduced asset sold by the government to the licenseholder. The values of these two assets are linked complementarily. A set of indicators is proposed that jointly may help judging whether the license or lease arrangement constitutes an asset in its own right or not. Alternative treatments of recording the license payments such as sale of the spectrum itself, other taxes on production, production of a service, or rent, are considered and rejected. Methods of amortization of the license over its life are considered.

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