This paper examines the characteristics of business cycles within and across thirteen countries for more than a century of observations adopting a monetary regime perspective. We search for empirical regularities of business cycle fluctuations during three monetary regimes; the classical gold standard, the interwar period and the post-World War II period. Our empirical results, based on bandpass filtered data, suggest that business cycle fluctuations have remained surprisingly stable across monetary regimes and across countries. In particular, the procyclical pattern for consumption, investment, exports and imports is stable across regimes and countries. We find a rise in the frequency of significant cyclical comovements across countries, possibly reflecting a recent rise in economic integration. Our evidence suggests that both the amplitude and the symmetry of business cycles have changed over time. The post-World War II period is marginally less volatile than the gold standard period while the interwar period is more volatile.

After reviewing the stages by which banking, debt, and currency crises have evolved from their past to present manifestations, we present evidence on the incidence and severity of crises over the past century. We then review the historical stages by which international lending in crises has evolved into its present forms, including rescue, guaranteed and, since 1995, bailout loans. For recipients and non-recipients of IMF loans before and after crises since 1972 we compare the difference in behavior of a number of salient macroeconomic aggregates. The evidence suggests that turning to the IMF does correct the problems that the recipients face, but is also associated with a decline in several measures of real economic performance. Moreover, it suggests that the countries, which turn to the IMF, are prone to follow policies conducive to crises. We attempt to isolate the economic impact of an IMF loan package by asking how countries would have fared in its absence by applying a two-step p...

credit, including © notice, is given to the source. 1 The paramount monetary policy objective of the European Central Bank, as required by the Maastricht Treaty, is control of inflation. Several countries also have made inflation control the primary goal of monetary policy, and the central banks of many countries, including the United Kingdom but not the United States, set explicit inflation targets. This emphasis reflects a

uring the past decade, many countries have set explicit inflation targets and mandated inflation control as the paramount objective of monetary policy. 1 Some critics of the view that monetary policy should focus solely on minimizing fluctuations in the inflation rate or price level argue that such a narrow focus would compromise the stability of the financial system. A central bank with price stability as its sole objective might not respond to financial instability unless its inflation goal was threatened. The financial system and the economy as a whole might then suffer