Academic literature on the topic 'Operator theory – Congresses'

Every game theorist knows of Mertens and Zamir (1985)'s universal beliefs space, which gives deep foundations to Harsanyi's model of Bayesian games, and Kohlberg and Mertens (1986)'s strategic stability, which is the first stone of a complete, axiomatic theory of selection among Nash equilibria. Some French mathematicians refer to the “Mertens–Zamir operator” when using techniques that Mertens and Zamir (1971) introduced to solve a class of repeated games with incomplete information. Readers of Macroeconomic Dynamics may instead have seen Mertens and Rubinchik's 2012 article “Intergenerational Equity and the Discount Rate for Policy Analysis.”The previous examples give just a slight idea of the scope of Jean-François Mertens's contributions, which also deal with general equilibrium, stochastic games, nonatomic cooperative games, and the strategic foundations of microeconomic theory. In his 2005 MD interview, Robert Aumann says, “A [. . .] person at CORE who has had a tremendous influence on game theory [. . .] is Jean-François Mertens. Mertens has done some of the deepest work in the discipline, some of it in collaboration with Israelis like my students Kohlberg, Neyman, and Zamir; he established a Belgian school of mathematical game theory that is marked by its beauty, depth, and sophistication.” The short interview that follows will definitely not account for the variety and the relevance of Jean-François's research achievements, but is typical of the way in which he talked about his work.Jean-François asked me to interview him for MD during the spring of 2010. We discussed by e-mail the topics that would be covered and on July 6, 2010, I came to Louvain-la-Neuve with a tape recorder. After lunch, Jean-François suggested that we have coffee on a terrace near the golf course and there, he patiently answered my questions, sometimes in French, sometimes in English, for about two hours. We planned to go on for at least another round but kept postponing the project. . . . When I saw Jean-François for the last time, in February 2012, I gave him the transcript of the July 2010 interview, but he hardly commented on it. He rather told me about an ongoing research article, “A Random Partitions Approach to the Value,” to be presented (by Abraham Neyman) as a “von Neumann lecture” at the World Congress of Game Theory in Istanbul in July 2012. At the same time, he was also completing, with Anna Rubinchik, the revision of a companion paper to the MD article referred to previously (“Equilibria in an Overlapping Generations Model with Transfer Policies and Exogenous Growth,” forthcoming in Economic Theory).Even if Jean-François did not proofread the transcript that follows, I cannot keep this material for myself. I am confident that those who have known Jean-François will take the interview, even incomplete, as an opportunity to remember his enthusiasm and his patience when he was talking about research. He would often start by identifying holes in obvious or well-known solutions to basic problems, and after a few audacious but illuminating shortcuts, would describe the most surprising achievements in everyday words. I hope that the interview will give an idea of Jean-François's approach to those who did not know him.Quite naturally, because MD was the planned outlet of the interview, we started by talking about the paper on the discount rate for policy analysis, which was already mentioned in the preceding. Jean-François made a number of informal comments, which usefully complement the MD article. He also explained how this paper led him and his coauthor to undertake a thorough analysis of overlapping generations economies in continuous time. This made a perfect transition to Jean-François's views on general equilibrium theory, his own work in this area, and his early career.The next step would be Jean-François's meeting with Bob Aumann, who introduced him to game theory. Jean-François pursued Aumann and Maschler's seminal work on infinitely repeated games with incomplete information, mostly with Shmuel Zamir. He went on with the existence of a value in stochastic games, another model of infinitely long games, which was introduced by Shapley in 1953. This research was undertaken with Abraham Neyman at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem in 1980. Soon after, Mertens and Zamir started to review and complete all available results on repeated games in order to prepare a reference book on this topic. The material kept growing. Sylvain Sorin joined the team in the nineties and a draft appeared as a 1994 CORE discussion paper. However, in 2010, the book was still unpublished. . . the interview ends up with Jean-François's feelings about the project.As shown by the list of publications at the end, many important contributions of Jean-François Mertens to game theory and microeconomics are not even mentioned in the interview. During his stay at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem in 1980, Jean-François not only worked with Abraham Neyman on stochastic games, but also had his first discussions with Elon Kohlberg on refinements of Nash equilibria. These would be followed by many others, at CORE and Harvard, until the famous Econometrica paper appeared in 1986. For the next 15 years or so, Jean-François further developed the theory of strategic stability, by himself and with his students.During the same period, Jean-François was also making progress on a completely different problem, the extension of the Shapley value to nonatomic cooperative games. Aumann and Shapley (1974) had made the first steps by proposing a value for smooth games. Jean-François proposed a complete answer to the problem in the eighties and, as already pointed out above, kept working on related topics until the very end.Even without entering into details, a description of Jean-François's more recent contributions would be beyond the scope of this short introduction. As the interview makes clear, Jean-François became more and more interested in the foundations of microeconomic theory. A typical example is his “limit price mechanism,” which can be loosely described as a double auction with several goods or as an extension of Shapley and Shubik's strategic market games. Another example is “relative utilitarianism,” which, as Jean-François explains in the interview, plays a crucial role in the determination of an appropriate social discount rate for the evaluation of long-term economic policies. Let us listen to him.

Intimations of mortality—Saull turned 70 in 1853 and had already been dangerously ill—should have made the search for a posthumous home for the museum paramount. Holyoake was reminding him of the late John Barber Beaumont and Charles Jenkins, whose bequests had not resulted in institutions, as they had intended. Saull still spent his days at the Mechanics’ Hall of Science, and we have first-hand accounts of life here, and its hosting of Chartists from Bonner’s Fields after their skirmishes with the police. Nor had co-operation lost its attraction: Saull could be found at the Co-Operative League; or involved in Aldersgate ward politics, or City politics, in the National Reform Society, and at the Archaeological Association’s congresses. The distractions were endless. Meanwhile the museum continued expanding, with models now being used in his account of life’s rise and socialist promise. (He even tried one last time, in an Essay on the Connexion Between Astronomical and Geological Phenomena in 1853, to convince the Geological Society grandees of his orbital explanations of stratal periodicity.) The museum was still being extolled for its worker-free access, and contrasted with the Great Exhibition’s capitalist appropriation of dinosaurs. Foreigners were turning up: Edward Hitchcock from America, Boucher de Perthes from France. Yet the 20,000 exhibits stood in peril of being lost. After his death they would need a permanent home in a proper working-man’s institution, and a sympathetic custodian. At Thomas Cooper’s suggestion, the John Street activists started drawing up plans for such a home, the Metropolitan Institution.

AbstractAn understanding of the different microbial constellations or microbiomes, which every habitat and every organism harbor, will be the key to addressing many of the challenges humanity will face in the twenty-first century. Such comprehension could launch several innovations relating to natural and cultural capital, including historical and artistic heritage. In relation to cultural heritage, microorganisms are mainly known through their role as deteriogens, but the features creating damage can be exploited positively, attaining more sustainable restoration strategies, in accordance with the principles of compatibility and retreatability deriving from reflections on the Cultural Heritage inspired by the Charter of Venice (International charter for the Conservation and restoration of monument and sites (the Venice Chart 1964). In: ICOMOS, IInd International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments, 1964) onwards. In this article, we show a series of case studies, using both wild-type microorganisms and plant-based extracts, providing a comprehensive proof of concept of the feasibility of biotechnological solutions for a more sustainable restoration strategy, to replace the products in use which are often dangerous for operators, aggressive for works of art and no longer compatible with the environment. The overview of the case studies presented, many of which are still unpublished, responds to the need to go beyond the state of the art and has entirely sprung from suggestions by restorers, interested in learning about potential innovations and strongly determined to introduce non-toxic products in their daily work. In this perspective, the case studies dealt with two topics: bio-cleaning and disinfection. Noteworthy results were obtained on a platform of different types of artworks and different materials with compatible, harmless and selective products.

This chapter outlines the relationship between race, ethnicity, and substantive representation via an in-depth discussion of how racial and ethnic group consciousness operates among black and Latino representatives in Congress. While all members of Congress face the pressure of making the right decisions to increase their chances at reelection, black and Latino legislators, unlike most white legislators, face an additional pressure: they are motivated by a group norm that requires them to engage in collective group action on issues of concern to other blacks and Latinos. White legislators are mainly responsible for being responsive to the constituents in their districts, whereas black and Latino legislators are also expected to represent the interests of all blacks and Latinos nationally. The strategy they pursue of “strategic group uplift” falls at the intersection of their electoral goals and their commitment to advance group interests.

In this paper I attempt to give an account of the moral criticizability of motive by appeal to some insights in semantic theory. I maintain that the actions for which we hold persons responsible cannot strictly be understood as expressive of semantic meaning. However, I argue that morally responsible actions can be understood on analogy with a basic Gricean distinction between speaker's and sentence meaning. The analogy suggests that morally responsible actions require a competent moral agent to operate from within the confines of an interpretive moral framework of action assessment, a framework analogous to the framework required for sentence meaning.

Although most research libraries accepted their reliance on the government-sponsored Library of Congress Mission, the Hoover Institution and Library on War, Revolution, and Peace did not. Its founder Herbert Hoover used the influence and reach of a former president to enable a private institution to operate where others were barred. Although eventually the Hoover Library won an authorized spot on the LCM, it largely operated in the shadows of the American military government. It drew upon an overlapping informal network of collectors, war correspondents, and intelligence agents to operate within the gray market for information in a defeated nation. These operations briefly came under scrutiny when one acquisition, The Goebbels Diaries, was published. Despite that episode, the library’s wartime collecting mission hastened the growth and prominence of the Hoover Institution as a center for the study of global politics, war, and diplomacy.

Abstract The withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989 concluded one of the largest and most successful covert operations ever mounted by the United States. Costing more than $2 billion over eight years, the program to arm and train Afghani Mujaheddin achieved an objective that Congressman Charles Wilson (D.-Tex.) characterized as being “completely beyond the realm of anyone’s imagination” at its outset. The successful Afghan operation is a demonstration of cooperation between the executive and the legislature at their best. Not only was the Congress able to review and discuss the operation over a protracted period of time without any breach of security, but it was the Congress that took the initiative to expand the program’s ambition and scope.

A significant hazard related to the use of stand-up lift trucks, or stand-up forklifts, is the hazard of a lower limb crush injury or foot crush due to the opening across the rear of the operator compartment. According to one lift truck manufacturer’s statistics, there have been over 500 accidents that resulted in an injury to the lower limb of the operator in the last 30 years that involved their stand-up lift trucks. [1] Other manufacturers have had similar accidents. The injuries have occurred to the lower limb of the operator due to the close proximity of the operator’s lower limbs to the exterior of the lift truck, and the confined areas that stand-up lift trucks operate in. The operator’s lower limb can become pinned and crushed between the moving lift and another fixed object such as a rack system, a column or another lift truck. Objects, such as a fork tine, can also intrude into the operator compartment, injuring the operator’s lower extremities. The ANSI/ITSDF B56.1, Safety Standard for Low Lift and High Lift Trucks, encourages stand-up lift trucks to be designed with an open compartment to permit easy ingress and egress. [2] According to the standard, the open design allows an operator a free and easy egress from the truck in the event of a tip-over or off-the-dock accident. However, the standard permits the use of additional guarding and enclosure of the operator compartment. Spring loaded doors (or spring assisted closing guards) have been designed, implemented and are available from many manufacturers, but no data has been published regarding the time to open and egress from the operator compartment. Latching doors have also been designed and manufactured, but are not currently available on the market except in the case of trucks equipped with freezer cabs, for operation in refrigerated environments. However, latched doors have been criticized for extending the egress time duration by approximately 1/2 second. This study shows that a spring loaded door can be implemented on a stand-up forklift while only increasing egress time by a negligible amount, 0.05 seconds over an open compartment configuration. Furthermore, this study shows that an optimized latching door, designed by Knott Laboratory engineers, can also be implemented for a stand-up forklift while only increasing egress time by 0.09 seconds. The latching door designed by Knott Laboratory decreases the change in egress time associated with a latched door by a factor of 5. Therefore, the addition of a spring loaded door, or a latching door will not significantly increase operator egress time and provide additional protection to the operator in the event of a collision while still maintaining quick egress.

It is well known in the tree care industry that operators can become caught or snagged by material entering a wood chipper. The consequences can be devastating. On commercial wood chippers with mechanical infeed systems, a caught operator can be pulled into the machine by the infeed system. Due to the speed of the infeed system, once an operator has been caught there is a limited window of time before serious injury or death can occur. Commercial wood chippers commonly pull in branches at speeds of 20 inches per second (50.8 centimeters per second) or faster. Therefore, caught operators may have no more than a few seconds to either free themselves from the branches or activate a device to stop the feeding mechanism. As an operator is being pulled into the chipper toward the chipping mechanism, various factors can limit the caught operator’s ability to access or activate a feed-stop device. Consequently, operators are sometimes unable to save themselves from catastrophic injury or death. This paper analyzes the hazards associated with wood chipper accidents and assesses the effectiveness of various safety devices intended to protect operators from this danger. The investigation includes a historical review of wood chipper safety devices and ultimately reveals the importance and effectiveness of feed-stop devices that can be passively activated by an operator who has become caught. The paper addresses commercial wood chippers with mechanical infeed systems.

Banco de la República is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2023. This is a very significant anniversary and one that provides an opportunity to highlight the contribution the Bank has made to the country’s development. Its track record as guarantor of monetary stability has established it as the one independent state institution that generates the greatest confidence among Colombians due to its transparency, management capabilities, and effective compliance with the central banking and cultural responsibilities entrusted to it by the Constitution and the Law. On a date as important as this, the Board of Directors of Banco de la República (BDBR) pays tribute to the generations of governors and officers whose commitment and dedication have contributed to the growth of this institution.1 Banco de la República’s mandate was confirmed in the National Constitutional Assembly of 1991 where the citizens had the opportunity to elect the seventy people who would have the task of drafting a new constitution. The leaders of the three political movements with the most votes were elected as chairs to the Assembly, and this tripartite presidency reflected the plurality and the need for consensus among the different political groups to move the reform forward. Among the issues considered, the National Constitutional Assembly gave special importance to monetary stability. That is why they decided to include central banking and to provide Banco de la República with the necessary autonomy to use the instruments for which they are responsible without interference from other authorities. The constituent members understood that ensuring price stability is a state duty and that the entity responsible for this task must be enshrined in the Constitution and have the technical capability and institutional autonomy necessary to adopt the decisions they deem appropriate to achieve this fundamental objective in coordination with the general economic policy. In particular, Article 373 established that “the State, through Banco de la República, shall ensure the maintenance of the purchasing power of the currency,” a provision that coincided with the central banking system adopted by countries that have been successful in controlling inflation. In 1999, in Ruling 481, the Constitutional Court stated that “the duty to maintain the purchasing power of the currency applies to not only the monetary, credit, and exchange authority, i.e., the Board of Banco de la República, but also those who have responsibilities in the formulation and implementation of the general economic policy of the country” and that “the basic constitutional purpose of Banco de la República is the protection of a sound currency. However, this authority must take the other economic objectives of state intervention such as full employment into consideration in their decisions since these functions must be coordinated with the general economic policy.” The reforms to Banco de la República agreed upon in the Constitutional Assembly of 1991 and in Act 31/1992 can be summarized in the following aspects: i) the Bank was assigned a specific mandate: to maintain the purchasing power of the currency in coordination with the general economic policy; ii) the BDBR was designatedas the monetary, foreign exchange, and credit authority; iii) the Bank and its Board of Directors were granted a significant degree of independence from the government; iv) the Bank was prohibited from granting credit to the private sector except in the case of the financial sector; v) established that in order to grant credit to the government, the unanimous vote of its Board of Directors was required except in the case of open market transactions; vi) determined that the legislature may, in no case, order credit quotas in favor of the State or individuals; vii) Congress was appointed, on behalf of society, as the main addressee of the Bank’s reporting exercise; and viii) the responsibility for inspection, surveillance, and control over Banco de la República was delegated to the President of the Republic. The members of the National Constitutional Assembly clearly understood that the benefits of low and stable inflation extend to the whole of society and contribute mto the smooth functioning of the economic system. Among the most important of these is that low inflation promotes the efficient use of productive resources by allowing relative prices to better guide the allocation of resources since this promotes economic growth and increases the welfare of the population. Likewise, low inflation reduces uncertainty about the expected return on investment and future asset prices. This increases the confidence of economic agents, facilitates long-term financing, and stimulates investment. Since the low-income population is unable to protect itself from inflation by diversifying its assets, and a high proportion of its income is concentrated in the purchase of food and other basic goods that are generally the most affected by inflationary shocks, low inflation avoids arbitrary redistribution of income and wealth.2 Moreover, low inflation facilitates wage negotiations, creates a good labor climate, and reduces the volatility of employment levels. Finally, low inflation helps to make the tax system more transparent and equitable by avoiding the distortions that inflation introduces into the value of assets and income that make up the tax base. From the monetary authority’s point of view, one of the most relevant benefits of low inflation is the credibility that economic agents acquire in inflation targeting, which turns it into an effective nominal anchor on price levels. Upon receiving its mandate, and using its autonomy, Banco de la República began to announce specific annual inflation targets as of 1992. Although the proposed inflation targets were not met precisely during this first stage, a downward trend in inflation was achieved that took it from 32.4% in 1990 to 16.7% in 1998. At that time, the exchange rate was kept within a band. This limited the effectiveness of monetary policy, which simultaneously sought to meet an inflation target and an exchange rate target. The Asian crisis spread to emerging economies and significantly affected the Colombian economy. The exchange rate came under strong pressure to depreciate as access to foreign financing was cut off under conditions of a high foreign imbalance. This, together with the lack of exchange rate flexibility, prevented a countercyclical monetary policy and led to a 4.2% contraction in GDP that year. In this context of economic slowdown, annual inflation fell to 9.2% at the end of 1999, thus falling below the 15% target set for that year. This episode fully revealed how costly it could be, in terms of economic activity, to have inflation and exchange rate targets simultaneously. Towards the end of 1999, Banco de la República announced the adoption of a new monetary policy regime called the Inflation Targeting Plan. This regime, known internationally as ‘Inflation Targeting,’ has been gaining increasing acceptance in developed countries, having been adopted in 1991 by New Zealand, Canada, and England, among others, and has achieved significant advances in the management of inflation without incurring costs in terms of economic activity. In Latin America, Brazil and Chile also adopted it in 1999. In the case of Colombia, the last remaining requirement to be fulfilled in order to adopt said policy was exchange rate flexibility. This was realized around September 1999, when the BDBR decided to abandon the exchange-rate bands to allow the exchange rate to be freely determined in the market.Consistent with the constitutional mandate, the fundamental objective of this new policy approach was “the achievement of an inflation target that contributes to maintaining output growth around its potential.”3 This potential capacity was understood as the GDP growth that the economy can obtain if it fully utilizes its productive resources. To meet this objective, monetary policy must of necessity play a countercyclical role in the economy. This is because when economic activity is below its potential and there are idle resources, the monetary authority can reduce the interest rate in the absence of inflationary pressure to stimulate the economy and, when output exceeds its potential capacity, raise it. This policy principle, which is immersed in the models for guiding the monetary policy stance, makes the following two objectives fully compatible in the medium term: meeting the inflation target and achieving a level of economic activity that is consistent with its productive capacity. To achieve this purpose, the inflation targeting system uses the money market interest rate (at which the central bank supplies primary liquidity to commercial banks) as the primary policy instrument. This replaced the quantity of money as an intermediate monetary policy target that Banco de la República, like several other central banks, had used for a long time. In the case of Colombia, the objective of the new monetary policy approach implied, in practical terms, that the recovery of the economy after the 1999 contraction should be achieved while complying with the decreasing inflation targets established by the BDBR. The accomplishment of this purpose was remarkable. In the first half of the first decade of the 2000s, economic activity recovered significantly and reached a growth rate of 6.8% in 2006. Meanwhile, inflation gradually declined in line with inflation targets. That was how the inflation rate went from 9.2% in 1999 to 4.5% in 2006, thus meeting the inflation target established for that year while GDP reached its potential level. After this balance was achieved in 2006, inflation rebounded to 5.7% in 2007, above the 4.0% target for that year due to the fact that the 7.5% GDP growth exceeded the potential capacity of the economy.4 After proving the effectiveness of the inflation targeting system in its first years of operation, this policy regime continued to consolidate as the BDBR and the technical staff gained experience in its management and state-of-the-art economic models were incorporated to diagnose the present and future state of the economy and to assess the persistence of inflation deviations and expectations with respect to the inflation target. Beginning in 2010, the BDBR established the long-term 3.0% annual inflation target, which remains in effect today. Lower inflation has contributed to making the macroeconomic environment more stable, and this has favored sustained economic growth, financial stability, capital market development, and the functioning of payment systems. As a result, reductions in the inflationary risk premia and lower TES and credit interest rates were achieved. At the same time, the duration of public domestic debt increased significantly going from 2.27 years in December 2002 to 5.86 years in December 2022, and financial deepening, measured as the level of the portfolio as a percentage of GDP, went from around 20% in the mid-1990s to values above 45% in recent years in a healthy context for credit institutions.Having been granted autonomy by the Constitution to fulfill the mandate of preserving the purchasing power of the currency, the tangible achievements made by Banco de la República in managing inflation together with the significant benefits derived from the process of bringing inflation to its long-term target, make the BDBR’s current challenge to return inflation to the 3.0% target even more demanding and pressing. As is well known, starting in 2021, and especially in 2022, inflation in Colombia once again became a serious economic problem with high welfare costs. The inflationary phenomenon has not been exclusive to Colombia and many other developed and emerging countries have seen their inflation rates move away from the targets proposed by their central banks.5 The reasons for this phenomenon have been analyzed in recent Reports to Congress, and this new edition delves deeper into the subject with updated information. The solid institutional and technical base that supports the inflation targeting approach under which the monetary policy strategy operates gives the BDBR the necessary elements to face this difficult challenge with confidence. In this regard, the BDBR reiterated its commitment to the 3.0% inflation target in its November 25 communiqué and expects it to be reached by the end of 2024.6 Monetary policy will continue to focus on meeting this objective while ensuring the sustainability of economic activity, as mandated by the Constitution. Analyst surveys done in March showed a significant increase (from 32.3% in January to 48.5% in March) in the percentage of responses placing inflation expectations two years or more ahead in a range between 3.0% and 4.0%. This is a clear indication of the recovery of credibility in the medium-term inflation target and is consistent with the BDBR’s announcement made in November 2022. The moderation of the upward trend in inflation seen in January, and especially in February, will help to reinforce this revision of inflation expectations and will help to meet the proposed targets. After reaching 5.6% at the end of 2021, inflation maintained an upward trend throughout 2022 due to inflationary pressures from both external sources, associated with the aftermath of the pandemic and the consequences of the war in Ukraine, and domestic sources, resulting from: strengthening of local demand; price indexation processes stimulated by the increase in inflation expectations; the impact on food production caused by the mid-2021 strike; and the pass-through of depreciation to prices. The 10% increase in the minimum wage in 2021 and the 16% increase in 2022, both of which exceeded the actual inflation and the increase in productivity, accentuated the indexation processes by establishing a high nominal adjustment benchmark. Thus, total inflation went to 13.1% by the end of 2022. The annual change in food prices, which went from 17.2% to 27.8% between those two years, was the most influential factor in the surge in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Another segment that contributed significantly to price increases was regulated products, which saw the annual change go from 7.1% in December 2021 to 11.8% by the end of 2022. The measure of core inflation excluding food and regulated items, in turn, went from 2.5% to 9.5% between the end of 2021 and the end of 2022. The substantial increase in core inflation shows that inflationary pressure has spread to most of the items in the household basket, which is characteristic of inflationary processes with generalized price indexation as is the case in Colombia. Monetary policy began to react early to this inflationary pressure. Thus, starting with its September 2021 session, the BDBR began a progressive change in the monetary policy stance moving away from the historical low of a 1.75% policy rate that had intended to stimulate the recovery of the economy. This adjustment process continued without interruption throughout 2022 and into the beginning of 2023 when the monetary policy rate reached 12.75% last January, thus accumulating an increase of 11 percentage points (pp). The public and the markets have been surprised that inflation continued to rise despite significant interest rate increases. However, as the BDBR has explained in its various communiqués, monetary policy works with a lag. Just as in 2022 economic activity recovered to a level above the pre-pandemic level, driven, along with other factors, by the monetary stimulus granted during the pandemic period and subsequent months, so too the effects of the current restrictive monetary policy will gradually take effect. This will allow us to expect the inflation rate to converge to 3.0% by the end of 2024 as is the BDBR’s purpose.Inflation results for January and February of this year showed declining marginal increases (13 bp and 3 bp respectively) compared to the change seen in December (59 bp). This suggests that a turning point in the inflation trend is approaching. In other Latin American countries such as Chile, Brazil, Perú, and Mexico, inflation has peaked and has begun to decline slowly, albeit with some ups and downs. It is to be expected that a similar process will take place in Colombia in the coming months. The expected decline in inflation in 2023 will be due, along with other factors, to lower cost pressure from abroad as a result of the gradual normalization of supply chains, the overcoming of supply shocks caused by the weather, and road blockades in previous years. This will be reflected in lower adjustments in food prices, as has already been seen in the first two months of the year and, of course, the lagged effect of monetary policy. The process of inflation convergence to the target will be gradual and will extend beyond 2023. This process will be facilitated if devaluation pressure is reversed. To this end, it is essential to continue consolidating fiscal sustainability and avoid messages on different public policy fronts that generate uncertainty and distrust. 1 This Report to Congress includes Box 1, which summarizes the trajectory of Banco de la República over the past 100 years. In addition, under the Bank’s auspices, several books that delve into various aspects of the history of this institution have been published in recent years. See, for example: Historia del Banco de la República 1923-2015; Tres banqueros centrales; Junta Directiva del Banco de la República: grandes episodios en 30 años de historia; Banco de la República: 90 años de la banca central en Colombia. 2 This is why lower inflation has been reflected in a reduction of income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient that went from 58.7 in 1998 to 51.3 in the year prior to the pandemic. 3 See Gómez Javier, Uribe José Darío, Vargas Hernando (2002). “The Implementation of Inflation Targeting in Colombia”. Borradores de Economía, No. 202, March, available at: https://repositorio.banrep.gov.co/handle/20.500.12134/5220 4 See López-Enciso Enrique A.; Vargas-Herrera Hernando and Rodríguez-Niño Norberto (2016). “The inflation targeting strategy in Colombia. An historical view.” Borradores de Economía, No. 952. https://repositorio.banrep.gov.co/handle/20.500.12134/6263 5 According to the IMF, the percentage change in consumer prices between 2021 and 2022 went from 3.1% to 7.3% for advanced economies, and from 5.9% to 9.9% for emerging market and developing economies. 6 https://www.banrep.gov.co/es/noticias/junta-directiva-banco-republica-reitera-meta-inflacion-3