The Q&A in this issue features seven questions on the role of precautionary savings in open economies (by Damiano Sandri); the research summaries are "The Macroeconomics of Aid (by Andrew Berg, Rafael Portillo, and Luis-Felipe Zanna) and "The Building Blocks to Measure Inflation" (by Mick Silver). The issue also lists the contents of the March 2011 issue of the IMF Economic Review, Volume 59 Number 1; visiting scholars at the IMF during January?March 2011; and recent IMF Working Papers and Staff Discussion Notes.
This paper examines the relative importance of monetary growth and exchange rate depreciation as causes of inflation in a sample of 10 Sub-Saharan African countries. Causality tests and impulse response functions derived from vector autoregression (VAR) analysis suggest that both monetary expansion and exchange rate adjustments cause inflation in a number of these countries. However, the failure of the tests to attribute the bulk of the variance in inflation in most of the countries to either variable suggests either a problem with the statistical technique or that some other factor--perhaps structural bottlenecks or a measure of overall macroeconomic policy stance incorporating both monetary and exchange rate policy--may be even more important as a determinant of inflation in African countries.