ABSTRACT

Inflation targeting, as a monetary-policy framework, is said to promote economic growth. Yet, when evaluating the macroeconomic performance of inflation-targeting regime, the existing literature only emphasizes the dynamics of inflation and the costs associated with taming inflation. There is hardly any assessment of the growth claim. To fill the gap and to measure the causal impact of inflation-targeting adoption on economic growth, we compare the dynamics of output growth and long-term unemployment between countries that have adopted inflation targeting and the non-adopting countries. Our findings seem to refute the growth claim, and paint a bleak picture of inflation targeting: when compared to the countries that did not adopt inflation targeting, there is a significant reduction in the average growth rate among the inflation-targeting adopters by over ½ percentage point. Additionally, long-term unemployment significantly rises among the inflation-targeting countries by over 1½ percentage points as compared to the non-adopters. These results are robust to both the exclusion of the outlier observations and to the sensitivity tests recommended for such analysis.

摘要

通货膨胀目标制作为一种货币政策框架，据说可以促进经济增长。然而，在评估通胀目标制的宏观经济表现时，现有文献仅强调通胀的动态和与驯服通胀相关的成本。几乎没有对增长声明的任何评估。为了填补空白并衡量采用通胀目标制对经济增长的因果影响，我们比较了采用通胀目标制的国家和未采用通胀目标制的国家之间的产出增长和长期失业动态。我们的研究结果似乎驳斥了增长主张，并描绘了通胀目标的惨淡图景：与未采用通胀目标的国家相比，通胀目标采用者的平均增长率显着降低了 0.5 个百分点以上。此外，与非采用通胀目标的国家相比，通胀目标国家的长期失业率显着上升 1.5 个百分点以上。这些结果对于排除异常值观察和推荐用于此类分析的敏感性测试都是稳健的。