Inflation targeting
In macroeconomics, inflation targeting is a monetary policy where a central bank follows an explicit target for the inflation rate for the medium-term and announces this inflation target to the public. The assumption is that the best that monetary policy can do to support long-term growth of the economy is to maintain price stability, and price stability is achieved by controlling inflation. The central bank uses short-term interest rates as its main monetary instrument.
An inflation-targeting central bank will raise or lower interest rates based on above-target or below-target inflation, respectively. The conventional wisdom is that raising interest rates usually cools the economy to rein in inflation; lowering interest rates usually accelerates the economy, thereby boosting inflation. The first three countries to implement fully-fledged inflation targeting were New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom in the early 1990s, although Germany had adopted many elements of inflation targeting earlier. As of 2024, inflation targeting has been adopted by 45 individual countries and the Euro Area as their monetary policy framework.
History
Early proposals of monetary systems targeting the price level or the inflation rate, rather than the exchange rate, followed the general crisis of the gold standard after World War I. Irving Fisher proposed a "compensated dollar" system in which the gold content in paper money would vary with the price of goods in terms of gold, so that the price level in terms of paper money would stay fixed. Fisher's proposal was a first attempt to target prices while retaining the automatic functioning of the gold standard. In his Tract on Monetary Reform, John Maynard Keynes advocated what we would now call an inflation targeting scheme. In the context of sudden inflations and deflations in the international economy right after World War I, Keynes recommended a policy of exchange-rate flexibility, appreciating the currency as a response to international inflation and depreciating it when there are international deflationary forces, so that internal prices remained more or less stable. Interest in inflation targeting waned during the Bretton Woods era, as they were inconsistent with the exchange rate pegs that prevailed during three decades after World War II.New Zealand, Canada, United Kingdom
Inflation targeting was pioneered in New Zealand in 1990. The government and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand adopted a Policy Target Agreement in March 1990 in which the Reserve Bank of New Zealand would pursue an inflation target range of 0 to 2 percent. Canada was the second country to formally adopt inflation targeting in February 1991.The United Kingdom adopted inflation targeting in October 1992 after exiting the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. The Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee was given sole responsibility in 1998 for setting interest rates to meet the Government's Retail Prices Index inflation target of 2.5%. The target changed to 2% in December 2003 when the Consumer Price Index replaced the Retail Prices Index as the UK Treasury's inflation index. If inflation overshoots or undershoots the target by more than 1%, the Governor of the Bank of England is required to write a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer explaining why, and how he will remedy the situation. The success of inflation targeting in the United Kingdom has been attributed to the bank's focus on transparency. The Bank of England has been a leader in producing innovative ways of communicating information to the public, especially through its Inflation Report, which have been emulated by many other central banks.
Inflation targeting then spread to other advanced economies in the 1990s and began to spread to emerging markets beginning in the 2000s.
European Central Bank
Although the ECB does not consider itself to be an inflation-targeting central bank, after the inception of the euro in January 1999, the objective of the European Central Bank has been to maintain price stability within the Eurozone. The Governing Council of the ECB in October 1998 defined price stability as inflation of under 2%, "a year-on-year increase in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices for the euro area of below 2%" and added that price stability "was to be maintained over the medium term". The Governing Council confirmed this definition in May 2003 following a thorough evaluation of the ECB's monetary policy strategy. On that occasion, the Governing Council clarified that "in the pursuit of price stability, it aims to maintain inflation rates below, but close to, 2% over the medium term". Since then, the numerical target of 2% has become common for major developed economies, including the United States and Japan.On 8 July 2021, the ECB changed its inflation target to a symmetrical 2% over the medium term. Symmetry in the inflation target means that the Governing Council considers negative and positive deviations of inflation from the target to be equally undesirable.
Emerging markets
In 2000, Frederic S. Mishkin concluded that "although inflation targeting is not a panacea and may not be appropriate for many emerging market countries, it can be a highly useful monetary policy strategy in a number of them".Armenia
The Central Bank of Armenia announced in 2006 that it will implement an inflation targeting strategy. The process of full transition to inflation targeting was supposed to end in 2008. Operational, macroeconomic and institutional preconditions for inflation targeting should have been met to ensure a full transition. CBA believes that it has managed to meet all the preconditions successfully and should concentrate on building a public trust in the new monetary policy regime. A specific model has been developed to estimate CBA's reaction function and the results showed that the inertia of inflation rate and interest rate are most vital in the reaction function. This can be an evidence that the announcement of the strategy is a trustworthy commitment. There are people who claim that inflation targeting is too restrictive for dealing with positive supply shocks. On the other hand, the IMF claims that inflation targeting strategy is good for developing economies, however it requires a lot of information for forecasting.The Central Bank continued to pursue a policy of tightening monetary conditions during the reporting period, increasing the policy interest rate by a total of 2.75 percentage points. At the same time, about half of the tightening, 1.25 percentage points, was carried out in 2022 in March, reacting to the high inflation situation formed in the case of unprecedented uncertainties.
Being constantly hit by external shocks to the national economy over the past three years, Armenia is still on the path of recovery thanks to economic management efforts. According to the 3-year Stand-By Arrangement, which came to its end on May 16, 2022, important structural and institutional reforms have been implemented. Those include improvement of tax compliance, budget process refinement, strengthening the stability of financial sector and most importantly fostering the inflation targeting framework.
Chile
In Chile, a 20% inflation rate pushed the Central Bank of Chile to announce at the end of 1990 an inflation objective for the annual inflation rate for the year ending in December 1991. However, Chile was not regarded as a fully-fledged inflation targeter until October 1999. According to Pablo García Silva, member of the board of the Central Bank of Chile, this has allowed to attenuate inflation. García Silva exemplifies this with the limited inflation seen in Chile during the 2002 Brazilian general election and the Great Recession of 2008–2009.Czech Republic
The Czech National Bank is an example of an inflation targeting central bank in a small open economy with a recent history of economic transition and real convergence to its Western European peers. Since 2010 the CNB uses 2 percent with a +/- 1pp range around it as the inflation target. The CNB places a lot of emphasis on transparency and communication; indeed, a recent study of more than 100 central banks found the CNB to be among the four most transparent ones.In 2012, inflation was expected to fall well below the target, leading the CNB to gradually reduce the level of its basic monetary policy instrument, the 2-week repo rate, until the zero lower bound was reached in late 2012. In light of the threat of a further fall in inflation and possibly even of a protracted period of deflation, on 7 November 2013 the CNB declared an immediate commitment to weaken the exchange rate to the level of 27 Czech korunas per 1 euro and to keep the exchange rate from getting stronger than this value until at least the end of 2014. The CNB thus decided to use the exchange rate as a supplementary tool to make sure that inflation returns to the 2 percent target level. Such a use of the exchange rate as tool within the regime of inflation targeting should not be confused with a fixed exchange-rate system or with a currency war.
United States
In a historic shift on 25 January 2012, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke set a 2% target inflation rate, bringing the Fed in line with many of the world's other major central banks. Until then, the Fed's policy committee, the Federal Open Market Committee, did not have an explicit inflation target but regularly announced a desired target range for inflation measured by the personal consumption expenditures price index.Prior to adoption of the target, some people argued that an inflation target would give the Fed too little flexibility to stabilise growth and/or employment in the event of an external economic shock. Another criticism was that an explicit target might turn central bankers into what Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England, had in 1997 colorfully termed "inflation nutters"—that is, central bankers who concentrate on the inflation target to the detriment of stable growth, employment, and/or exchange rates. King went on to help design the bank's inflation targeting policy, and asserts that the buffoonery has not actually happened, as did Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, who stated in 2003 that all inflation targeting at the time was of a flexible variety, in theory and practice.
Former Chairman Alan Greenspan, as well as other former FOMC members such as Alan Blinder, typically agreed with the benefits of inflation targeting, but were reluctant to accept the loss of freedom involved; Bernanke, however, was a well-known advocate.
In August 2020, the FOMC released a revised Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy. The review announced the FED would seek to achieve inflation that 'averages' 2% over time. In practice this means that following periods when inflation has been running persistently below 2 percent, appropriate monetary policy will likely aim to achieve inflation moderately above 2 percent for some time. This way, the fed hopes to better anchor longer-term inflation expectations, which they say would foster price stability and moderate long-term interest rates and enhance the committee's ability to promote maximum employment in the face of significant economic disturbances.