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Report
Some comparative evidence on the effectiveness of inflation targeting
Does the adoption of an inflation target by a country have an effect on that country's rate of inflation and on inflation's interaction with real economic variables? Does inflation targeting alter private-sector expectations? The question of effectiveness must be posed as a counterfactual -did target adopting countries find economic benefits they would not have found had they not targeted? We offer three sets of measurements of the effect of inflation targeting: the first concerning whether the disinflation has been achieved at lower cost, or whether inflation has come down in targeters to a ...
Journal Article
Inflation targeting: lessons from four countries
In recent years, a number of central banks have chosen to orient their monetary policy toward the achievement of numerical inflation targets. This study examines the experience of the first three countries to adopt an inflation-targeting strategy--New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It also considers the German experience with a monetary targeting scheme that incorporated many elements of inflation targeting even earlier. The authors find that the countries adopting a numerical inflation target have successfully maintained low inflation rates. Other benefits of inflation targeting ...
Report
Central bank independence and disinflationary credibility: a missing link?
Granting central banks independence from short-term political control is widely assumed to decrease inflation by increasing the credibility of commitments to price stability. This paper analyzes public- and private-sector behavior in a sample of seventeen OECD countries for evidence of variations in disinflationary credibility with monetary institutions. The paper does not find evidence that the costs of disinflation are lower in countries with independent central banks, even when differences in contracting behavior are taken into account. It also does not find evidence that central bank ...
Report
Does talk matter after all? Inflation targeting and central bank behavior
Interpretations of inflation targeting (IT) have ranged widely, from ?inflation-only targeting? without regard for output, to cheap talk without effect, to transparency increasing flexibility without cost. We characterize five interpretations of the adoption if IT as shifts between strategies in a conventional model of monetary time-inconsistency. Their implications for central bank behavior are compared to the time-series properties of inflation, and the response of interest rates to inflation movements, for three countries adopting it in the early 1990s. ; There is no evidence that IT ...
Report
Disciplined discretion: the German and Swiss monetary targeting frameworks in operation
Many observers have held up the records of price stability in Germany and in Switzerland as examples of the benefits of a monetary targeting regime. These claims have been juxtaposed in recent years with econometric analyses of Bundesbank policy which have shown an absence of dependable relationship between money growth, inflation, and policy movements. We offer an analysis of actual Bundesbank and Swiss National Bank monetary policy as it operated which explains this puzzling gap between performance and presumed policy. We confirm that neither country is a monetary targeter according to a ...