Conceptual Note On Inflation Targeting Types And Their Performance In Anchoring Inflation Expectations

Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

Understanding the sources of inflation persistence is crucial for monetary policy. This paper provides an empirical assessment of the influence of inflation expectations' anchoring on the persistence of inflation. We construct a novel index of inflation expectations' anchoring using survey-based inflation forecasts for 45 economies starting in 1989. We then study the response of consumer prices to terms-of-trade shocks for countries with flexible exchange rates. We find that these shocks have a significant and persistent effect on consumer price inflation when expectations are poorly anchored. By contrast, inflation reacts by less and returns quickly to its pre-shock level when expectations are strongly anchored.

Inflation targeting is implemented in different ways -- most often by adopting point targets, by having tolerance bands around a point target, or by specifying target ranges. Using data for 20 economies, this paper tests whether the various target types affect the anchoring of inflation expectations at shorter horizons differently. It tests two contradictory hypotheses, namely that targets with intervals lead to (i) less anchoring, e.g. because they provide more flexibility to the central bank, or (ii) better anchoring, because they are missed less often, leading to an enhanced credibility. The evidence refutes the first hypothesis, and generally finds that target ranges or (in some cases) tolerance bands outperform the other types. However, the effects partially depend on the economic context and no target type consistently outperforms all others. This suggests that there are some benefits to adopting intervals, but the central bank can anchor inflation expectations also by other means.

This is the second chapter of a forthcoming monograph entitled "On Implementing Full-Fledged Inflation-Targeting Regimes: Saying What You Do and Doing What You Say." We begin by discussing the costs of inflation, including their role in generating boom-bust cycles. Following a general discussion of the need for a nominal anchor, we describe a specific type of monetary anchor, the inflation-targeting regime, and its two key intellectual roots-the absence of long-run trade-offs and the time-inconsistency problem. We conclude by providing a brief introduction to the way in which inflation targeting works.

As with many monetary policy frameworks, inflation targeting is subject to the well-known problem of inflation bias. With inflation targeting, however, the bias becomes apparent not as inflation above desired levels, but as a wedge between the announced target and observed inflation. This inconsistency could render the framework neither credible nor enforceable since the target is overshot on average. The problem can be addressed by assigning price stability as the single policy objective or by assigning a joint target for both inflation and output, provided that they are consistent. Many inflation targeting countries take the joint target approach implicitly through transparency measures which publicly assess monetary conditions in terms of potential output and output gaps.

This paper investigates the meaning of the bottom of target bands in inflation targeting regimes. It is argued that the design of lower limits on target bands, if not done with care, can lead to a lack of transparency, potentially confusing markets about how the authorities will react to a fall in inflation. After first discussing the conceptual issues, the paper then examines the experience with target bands in New Zealand, Israel and Canada and explores how the conceptual issues have played out in practice.

This paper proposes an ESTAR modeling framework to analyze the anchoring of inflation expectations. Anchoring criteria are empirical estimates of a market implied inflation target as well as the strength of the anchor that holds expectations at the target. Results from daily financial market expectations in the United States, European Monetary Union, United Kingdom and Sweden indicate: First, shorter-term expectations are better anchored than longer-term expectations. Second, expectations are best anchored in the EU, followed by US, Sweden and UK. Third, during the crisis market implied targets mostly decline while the strength of the anchor remains mostly unaffected. -- Monetary policy ; anchoring ; inflation expectations ; break even inflation rates ; ESTAR model.