 Can Domestic Policies Influence Inflation?Ashoka Mody and Franziska Ohnsorge No 2007/257, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund Abstract: Globalization operates not only by reducing domestic pressures on inflation but also by reducing the scope of domestic authorities to influence the pace of inflation. First, as markets are integrated, the common, cross-border sources of inflation increase, reducing the extent of domestically-generated inflation. Based on a methodology identifying common time and sectoral trends, we find this to be especially the case in the countries of the eurozone, with their longer histories of product market integration. Second, even the domestically-generated component of inflation may be difficult to manipulate. Policies act, especially in the shortrun, through managing domestic demand. But the relationship between domestic demand (proxied by the output gap and unit labor cost growth) and inflation has been weak, constrained in part by trade openness. Moreover, the domestic component of inflation contains a country-specific international catch-up process that generates price equalization across countries. The evidence is that catch-up has accelerated with increasing market integration. Thus, for the eurozone economies, there may be limits on the use of fiscal and labor market policies to contain inflation. The new member states may not have policy leverage to meet the Maastricht inflation limit necessary for entering the eurozone. Casestudies show that fiscal consolidation needed to comply with the inflation criterion can be large and sustained only briefly to get under the Maastricht wire. Keywords: WP; exchange rate; fiscal policy; money market; business cycle; Inflation; Globalization; Price convergence; Maastricht criterion; Euro adoption; eurozone country; inflation term; EMU accession; Phillips curve; Maastricht inflation criterion; rate of inflation; eurozone economy; catch-up process; labor cost movement; convergence effects in the eurozone; eurozone sample; Output gap; Labor costs; Nominal effective exchange rate; Value-added tax; Europe; inflation criterion; inflation increase (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2007/257 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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