The 2020 Monetary and Banking Conference of the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic (BCRA) will be held throughout the month of November. This year the Conference will be entitled Challenges, objectives and instruments of Central Banks in a new global context, and will have a virtual format, which adapts to the context that the world is going through due to the pandemic. This event is part of the 85th anniversary of the founding of the BCRA.
After three years – the last edition was in 2017 – the Monetary and Banking Conference (JMB) is back with a program that promotes debate and reflection. They will feature prominent speakers, such as Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize in Economics, and Alicia Bárcena, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). The Conference will also feature the interventions of the President of the BCRA, Miguel Ángel Pesce, and the Minister of Economy, Martín Guzmán.
The 2020 WDB will be held in a cycle of four panel discussions, which will take place on Wednesdays 4, 11, 18 and 25 November. The topics of the panels are: The role of monetary policy in the post-pandemic, from theory to practice; Challenges and perspectives of Central Banks in Latin American and other emerging economies; Macroeconomic policies in the era of COVID-19; and, finally, the closing panel: challenges and perspectives in a new global context.
The complete list of speakers includes Alicia Bárcena, Daniela Gabor, Jan Kregel, Marc Lavoie, Cristina Marcuzzo, Perry Mehrling, Daniela Prates, Hyun Song Shin, José Darío Uribe and L. Randall Wray, and, at the closing of the Conference, Joseph Stiglitz, Miguel Ángel Pesce and Martín Guzmán. The team of the BCRA’s Deputy General Manager of Economic Research, led by Germán Feldman, Chief Economist of the Bank, was in charge of the organization of the Conference.
This edition of the JMB will have a virtual, open and free format, which will favor the presentations to have a greater reach to interested people from all over the country and the region. During each day, according to the established program, the presentations will be uploaded to the website, which will then remain on the platform so that the public can access it at any time they want.
The holding of the 2020 MBB is part of the recovery of the BCRA’s academic profile, an active policy of this institution that this year has allowed the restoration of important programs and activities that were suspended, such as the celebration of the Annual Economic Research Award “Dr Raúl Prebisch”, the relaunch of the journal Ensayos Económicos and the publication of the new blog Central de Ideas.
Like all these academic and outreach initiatives, the celebration of the MBMB seeks to promote discussion on macroeconomic, monetary and financial issues, for a wide audience, which includes – but is not limited to – professional and academic economists, policymakers and economics students. The 2020 MBMB has a digital platform that brings together all the relevant information (programme, interventions and description of speakers) and that will allow interested people access to the different discussion panels, which will take place throughout November.
