Price Stabilization In The 1990s

Investigates various aspects of inflation - the recent history of inflation as well as potential sources of changes, the technical issues regarding the measurement of inflation, the indicators for future inflation, and the policy implications to achieve and maintain price stability.

Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.

Covers trends from 1957 to 1995.

How one of the greatest economic expansions in history sowed the seeds of its own collapse. With his best-selling Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz showed how a misplaced faith in free-market ideology led to many of the recent problems suffered by the developing nations. Here he turns the same light on the United States. The Roaring Nineties offers not only an insider's illuminating view of policymaking but also a compelling case that even the Clinton administration was too closely tied to the financial community—that along with enormous economic success in the nineties came the seeds of the destruction visited on the economy at the end of the decade. This groundbreaking work by the Nobel Prize-winning economist argues that much of what we understood about the 1990s' prosperity is wrong, that the theories that have been used to guide world leaders and anchor key business decisions were fundamentally outdated. Yes, jobs were created, technology prospered, inflation fell, and poverty was reduced. But at the same time the foundation was laid for the economic problems we face today. Trapped in a near-ideological commitment to free markets, policymakers permitted accounting standards to slip, carried deregulation further than they should have, and pandered to corporate greed. These chickens have now come home to roost. The paperback includes a new introduction that reviews the continued failure of the Bush administration's policies, which have taken a bad situation and made it worse.

This report was prepared by a team led by Roberto Zagha, under the general direction of Gobind Nankani.

America's power has declined since 1945, yet America's democratic purposes are more widely emulated in the world today than ever before, and economic growth and employment in the United States in the 1980s reached levels that rivaled the boom years of postwar prosperity from 1947-1967. Challenging the pessimists who focus only on the decline of American power, this book argues that outcomes depend much more on how America defines its political identity or national purposes in the world community and what specific economic policies it chooses. In recent years, America has projected a more self-confindent political identity, anchoring an unprecedented trend even in the communist world towards freer political institutions; and future American economic policy choices, especially the need to reduce the budget deficit, still hold the key to preserving and enhancing what considerable power the United States retains. This pathbreaking book is intended for the general reader, but will be essential reading not only for economists, politicians, and policy makers, but also for scholars and students working in economics and international relations.

This paper examines inflation dynamics in the United States since 1960, with a particular focus on the Great Recession. A puzzle emerges when Phillips curves estimated over 1960-2007 are ussed to predice inflation over 2008-2010: inflation should have fallen by more than it did. We resolve this puzzle with two modifications of the Phillips curve, both suggested by theories of costly price adjustment: we measure core inflation with the median CPI inflation rate, and we allow the slope of the Phillips curve to change with the level and vairance of inflation. We then examine the hypothesis of anchored inflation expectations. We find that expectations have been fully "shock-anchored" since the 1980s, while "level anchoring" has been gradual and partial, but significant. It is not clear whether expectations are sufficiently anchored to prevent deflation over the next few years. Finally, we show that the Great Recession provides fresh evidence against the New Keynesian Phillips curve with rational expectations.