abcd a POLICY INSIGHT No.1 JUNE 2007 Are International Financial Crises a Barbarous Relic? Inflation Targeting as a Monetary Vaccine ANDREW K ROSE University of California, Berkeley and CEPR Escaping the swamp: fixed exchange rates and That was then. In 1990 a new monetary strategy financial crises emerged from the Antipodes: inflation targeting. he 1990s were plagued by international financial Inflation targeting requires that the central bank has a crises. Countries rich and poor, large and small, numerical inflation target to hit in the medium run in a Tsaw their currency attacked by speculators and transparent and accountable fashion, and this should be witnessed their fixed exchange rate policies fall into the the most important objective of monetary policy. dust-bin of history. The UK in 1992, Mexico in 1994, Inflation targeting has met with unprecedented popu- Thailand in 1997, Russia in 1998, Brazil in 1999,… the larity in the stodgy world of central banking; fourteen list is long. Yet since the collapse of Argentina in 2001, of the thirty OECD countries have already adopted the the international financial system has been an oasis of strategy! But even this understates its importance. stability. Some believe this is merely good luck, and that Twelve OECD countries are in EMU, which is almost a the bad old days will return. They are wrong. formal inflation targeter and may become one soon; Most all the international financial crises of the pre- more are waiting in the wings to join EMU. The United vious millennium had a common element: a monetary States has also been an implicit inflation-targeting policy geared towards a fixed exchange rate. For central country for years, and may become an explicit one bankers steeped in monetary history, that made sense; soon. There is much speculation that Japan may adopt 1 there was essentially no alternative. There were only a inflation targeting when its deflationary days are defin- . couple of plausible monetary strategies, and a fixed itively over. So the entire OECD may soon be using the o exchange rate was the time-tested option. During the same monetary strategy. And inflation targeting is not N ‘Bretton Woods’ regime after World War II, countries simply a policy of rich countries. Ten developing coun- fixed their exchange rates to the US, and through it to tries with 750 million people have also adopted infla- T gold. A fixed exchange rate is a well-defined monetary tion targeting – often after losing the fight to maintain H policy. It subordinates monetary policy to the objective a fixed exchange rate. In all, inflation targeting is the of exchange rate stability. Since this subordination came formal basis of monetary policy for well over a billion G I at the expense of domestic interests, most fixed people in countries that constitute over a quarter of the S exchange rates did not stayed fixed for long. global economy, and the informal framework accounts N for much more (see the timeline in Figure 1). Where I What is to be done after floating? The limited New Zealand leads, the world follows. number of monetary regimes Y When a country loses its fight with the speculators and Hello inflation targeting, goodbye monetary C floats its exchange rate, it has to choose another mon- instability I etary regime; floating is not a monetary policy. But until Inflation targeting is a durable monetary strategy. L recently there was essentially no alternative to fixed Indeed, it is perhaps the only durable monetary O rates. Two decades of unsuccessful experimentation fol- strategy. To date, twenty-seven countries have adopted P lowed the collapse of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s. inflation targets. Only two of those – Finland and Spain Some countries tried, in vain, to pursue money growth – have abandoned inflation targeting. Both left to join R targets. Others adopted hybrid strategies involving mul- EMU in 1999, neither under economic duress (and the P tiple or moving targets; still others adopted currency ECB maintains an inflation target as part of their mon- E boards or monetary unions; some countries operated etary strategy). This stands in stark contrast to alterna- C without clearly defined monetary policies. tive monetary regimes experienced since World War II, To download this and other Policy Insights vist www.cepr.org JUNE 2007 2 Figure 1 Timeline for adoption of inflation targeting Turkey Romania Indonesia Slovak Rep. Philippines Peru Hungary Norway Iceland Thailand South Africa Switzerland Colombia Asian Crisis starts Brazil Mexico Poland Korea Czech Rep. Spain EMU starts Finland Australia Sweden UK Israel Canada Chile New Zealand 1990 1994 1998 2002 2006 which have been plagued by crisis and failure, and have role for public capital flows; speculative activity on the been accordingly transient. Fixed exchange rate regimes foreign exchange markets no longer revolves around do not stay fixed forever! And durability is important; it speculators trying to attack a country's fixed rate. And is the best single indicator of success. Poor policies tend the increased volume of private capital flows has to be changed while things that ain't broke aren't fixed. allowed the system to handle large sustained current Countries are switching to inflation targeting because it account imbalances, which are proportionately larger seems to deliver the goods: financial stability. now than during the Bretton Woods regime. Much about the new system's attractiveness can be ...To date, twenty-seven countries seen by tracing out the history of its emergence. The have adopted inflation targets. Only Bretton Woods regime was deliberately planned, the two of those - Finland and Spain - outcome of a long series of wartime negotiations have abandoned inflation targeting. among eminent economists representing the interests of critical countries, especially the UK and the US. This is Both left to join EMU in 1999, in stark contrast with the evolutionary development of neither under economic duress... the BWR system. Countries that adopt inflation target- ing do not agree to join an internationally recognised 1 The durability of inflation-targeting regimes is the monetary system and do not accept ‘rules of the game’, . most striking contrast with previous international mon- either implicitly or explicitly. Rather, the system has o etary systems such as the Bretton Woods system, often grown in a more Darwinian style, simply because of its N considered to be the ‘good old days.’ But there are many manifest success. Also, international cooperation is not other differences. In fact, there are so many points of a key part of the emerging international monetary sys- T comparison between the features of the Bretton Woods tem. This is another difference with the Bretton Woods H system and the behaviour of the inflation targeters that system, which required massive international coopera- G I have collected them together in Table 1. tion to function (as do many modern attempts to I reshape the international financial architecture). S Inflation targeting, the opposite of Bretton Accordingly, some of the key institutions of the Bretton Woods N Woods system are now essentially irrelevant. The I Most of the differences between regimes are straight- International Monetary Fund has evolved into a crisis- forward. Mundell's celebrated ‘Incompatible Trinity’ manager for developing countries (often those suffering Y states that fixed exchange rates, free capital flows and speculative attacks on their fixed exchange rate regimes) C I a domestic focus for monetary policy are desirable goals and plays no real role in the new system. There is no L that are mutually exclusive. So inflation targeters tend special role for a centre or anchor country (the United to let their exchange rates float reasonably freely. Most States during Bretton Woods; Germany for the O inflation-targeting countries have liberalised capital European Monetary System), so there is no hegemonic P markets and relinquished control over their exchange title to fight over. Gold is irrelevant. It may be for these rates – the exact reverse of the Bretton Woods system. reasons that developing countries are participating more R Indeed the emerging 'system', or non-system to be quickly and fully in the system than they did under P more precise, could be accurately labelled as Bretton- Bretton Woods. The key players are each nation's cen- E Woods-reversed, or BWR for short. Since the inflation- tral bank, with these now more independent, account- C targeting countries float, there is typically no important able and transparent than they were under Bretton To download this and other Policy Insights vist www.cepr.org JUNE 2007 3 Table 1 Features of International Monetary Systems Bretton Woods Inflation Targeting 1959-1971 1990-Present Regime durability Low High Exchange rate regime Fixed Floating Focus of monetary policy International Domestic Intermediate target Exchange Rate None/inflation forecast Capital mobility Controlled Relatively unrestricted Capacity for current Limited High account imbalances System design Planned Unplanned International cooperation Necessary Not required Role of IMF Key in principle Small Role of gold Key in principle Negligible Role of US as centere country Key in practice Small Key members Essentially large and northern OECD/LDCs, often small Central banks Dependent, unaccountable Independent, accountable Transparency Low High Alignment with academics Low High Woods. All of this is in contrast not only to Bretton it is for countries pursuing other strategies. This means Woods, but also to the many complicated plans current- that the domestic focus of inflation targeting does not ly being proposed to tie monetary policies more tightly seem to come at the expense of higher exchange rate together in Asia, Africa, and the Gulf. volatility. Further, countries that switch to inflation tar- geting also experience a drop in the frequency of 'sud- ...The system of domestically- den stops' of capital inflows.