Developing an understanding of monetary policy in LICs must start with the evidence. This chapter briefly reviews the challenges facing the empirical researcher in SSA, including scarce and inaccurate data, short policy regimes that make powerful inference difficult, and the lack of structural models to help interpret the data. It provides an overview of Chapters 4–6, which take three very different approaches to looking at these data: a broad search for cross-country stylized facts (Chapter 4), a detailed case study of a major monetary policy event (Chapter 5), and an examination of whether vector auto-regressions (VARs)—the workhorse empirical tool in this area—are likely to yield useful results in the SSA context (Chapter 6).
