Vidya Mahambare

This paper examines how the Bank of England conducts monetary policy in practice and assesses its policy preferences. Our empirical results using monthly ex post inflation forecast suggest that pursued policy can be characterized by a nonlinear policy reaction function with a deflation bias. We also find evidence of a target range as opposed to a point target for the 1992–5 period. These results are however, not robust to the use of the Bank's own forecast which suggests that pursued policy is consistent with a symmetric point target for inflation. In practice however, inflation has been consistently below the Bank's inflation target in recent years. We argue that a plausible explanation for this is that the MPC had systematically over predicted inflation, which in turn may have resulted in overly restrictive policy.

This paper compares the inflation targeting framework adopted by the European Central Bank (ECB) vis-à-vis the Bank of England (BOE) and argues that the ECB's strategy does not constitute the best international practice. The definition of price stability adopted by the ECB is ambiguous and therefore less effective as an anchor for inflation expectations. Furthermore, greater transparency would make the ECB more accountable, while also improving stabilisation properties of monetary policy. Thus, the success of inflation targeting depends on operational details, such as how the central bank's objectives are defined and communicated to the public.

We estimate an augmented Phillips curve to examine the effects of supply shocks on inflation in India. Our results suggest that supply shocks only have a transitory effect on both headline and core measures of inflation. The evidence is robust to a variety of re-specifications and core inflation measures. The potential explanation for this is that monetary policy has not provided the basis for a sustained change in the inflation process by accommodating supply shocks i.e., expanding money supply in response to negative supply shocks. Thus, monetary authorities have implicitly focused on a core measure of inflation by discounting price movements that are expected to be reversed in the short-run. In short, what is crucial in inflation determination is not supply shocks per se but how policymakers respond to these shocks.