Monetary Policy, Central Banking and Economic Performance in the Caribbean

Despite their common British colonial heritage, the twelve Caribbean economies examined in this book exhibit a wide variety of monetary regimes. These include a currency union, currency board, and fixed and floating exchange rate regimes which allow for a range of rules and discretionary-based monetary policies. Derick Boyd and Ron Smith trace the historical origins and evolution of this variety of Caribbean institutions and examine the effect of policy regime on economic performance, using theoretical economic analysis and several econometric techniques, which they explain in detail. Their conclusion is that better economic performance has benefited from an embedded tradition of conservative central banking, either hardwired, as in the case of a currency board, or through discretionary policies, a tradition which seems to have been largely eroded in the resource-rich economies.