The paper examines the monetary policy actions through which central banks in sub-Saharan Africa have tried to eliminate the negative impacts of the shocks facing their economies. We compare two different monetary policy regimes: a currency board regime (in the CFA zone) and an inflation targeting policy regime (Ghana and South Africa) when central banks respond to demand, supply, and fiscal shocks. We extend the usual forecasting and policy analysis system models to replicate the economic features of these economies during the period 2002–12 and to evaluate the impact of several policies in response to these shocks. We find that both policies are inappropriate in helping the economies escape from the effects of negative demand shocks, both are essential when negative shocks to primary balance occur, while inflation targeting dominates the currency board regime as a strategy to cope with positive shocks to inflation.

This paper focuses on the following question: has the global financial stress in the US markets during the subprime crisis induced a persistent volatility of Indian equity stocks? We answer this question using sector-based data and we propose a simple stochastic volatility model augmented with exogenous inputs (financial stress indicators in the US market). We derive analytically the autocorrelation of the squared returns using cross-moments and estimate the impact of several variables such as the CDS spreads, the ABCP spreads, market liquidity, the volatility of the S&P 500 using a Kalman filter approach with the impact captured through Almon polynomials. We find a strong evidence of persistent volatility irrespective of the sector and interpret this finding as the result of two factors: the lower liquidity of the Indian equity markets during the subprime crisis and a wake-up call effect.

This paper discusses sources of self‐fulfilling equilibria in the Eurozone when some governments are highly susceptible to movements of distrust by investors who fear some payment difficulty. Self‐fulfilling prophecies occur when countries become insolvent only because investors fear insolvency. They induce multiple equilibria, some of which correspond to bad equilibria and others to good equilibria. An important issue then is to solve this problem, notably to eliminate the bad equilibria. In the short‐run, the role of the central bank as a lender of last resort is key. But this raises issues about the risk inherent to its intervention (inflation, solvency). In the medium run, macroeconomic policies in the euro are central (structural reforms and the reduction of external imbalances). In the long run, it may be worth proceeding to the consolidation of national budgets and debts, which would protect the countries of being forced with default by the financial markets. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This introduction presents a selection of articles dealing with the issue of measuring the fiscal and financial vulnerabilities in the advanced economies. These articles were presented at a conference organized jointly by the Banque de France and BETA in Strasbourg on 13–14 September. The authors show that the improvement of macroeconomic toolkit goes hand in hand with the strengthening of fiscal frameworks and the tools for managing financial tensions. They propose several indicators in order to capture the variety of vulnerabilities observed in the industrialized countries since the recent great depression: funding needs, market perceptions risks, stress dependence among sovereigns and the reactions of governments to cope with these new challenges.