Would it help to have a higher inflation rate?

Economists generally agree that a high inflation rate has various economic costs and therefore, we should use economic policy to keep inflation low. Since the mid 1980s, governments have increasingly set strict inflation targets, e.g. ECB inflation of less than 2%. The Bank of England targeting inflation of 2% +/-1. However, some economists argue that …

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Printing money, imports and inflation

Readers Question: I’ve recently been studying monetarism and I have a question with regards to printing money. It is well known than printing money leads to inflation as demonstrated by the Fisher equation, but say if the new money created was all spent on imports i.e. all the newly printed money leaked from the domestic …

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Producer Inflation

Another guide to inflationary pressures is the producer price index (PPI). Producer inflation measures the price of goods produced by manufacturing firms. This is sometimes referred to as ‘factor gate prices’ In the year to February 2013 the output price index for home sales of manufactured products rose 2.3%. In the same period the total …

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RPIJ – a new inflation measure

For those who like to keep track of the myriad different rates of inflation, the ONS will shortly be publishing a new measure – RPIJ. RPIJ will be basically RPI, but calculated in the same way as CPI which uses a geometric mean. CPI = official household inflation measure (CPI) – calculated using a geometric …

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The wrong and right kind of inflation

I like this article about the wrong kind of inflation by Roger Bootle Or as his cleaner said: “It’s not the inflation they need to sort out, Mr Bootle, it’s the rising prices!” Essentially, the wrong kind of inflation is  cost-push inflation. This inflation is due to rising costs of production, such as rising energy …

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The impact of changing the inflation target

Readers Question: The task of MPC is to stabilise inflation at 2%. Current inflation is around 5% and the Bank of England has to tighten the Monetary policy to control the inflation. If the Government revises the inflation target and set it to 5%, then what would be the effect on the economy and what …

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