A ‘Second-Best’ Rationale to Deflationary Monetary Policy in Japan

The Bank of Japan permitted a ten-year period of deflation (1995-2005) which appears to have ended in 2006. The deflation, as well as the preceding disinflation, adversely affected the financial and real sectors of the economy that in turn, made it difficult to recover from the collapse of asset prices in 1990 and 1991. Various ad hoc explanations have been offered to account for the deflation period. This paper offers a second-best explanation based on a two-player policy game between the Bank of Japan and the banking system in which the banking system relies on an accommodative policy of forgiveness and forbearance by the Ministry of Finance to deal with weak balance sheets. The paper does not explicitly model the Ministry of Finance preference function but incorporates the Bank of Japan’s perceived willingness of the Ministry to accommodate the banking system in the Bank’s reaction function. The model suggests that in the context of established deflationary expectations and large amounts of debt, the Bank of Japan explicitly regarded the level of debt as exceeding the socially optimal level, that Ministry of Finance forgiveness and forbearance contributed to this excess, and lacking an instrument to reverse deflationary expectations, the Bank of Japan employed deflation as a disciplining instrument to limit real debt.Monetary Policy, Deflation, Japan

A Reassessment of the Problems with Interest Targeting: What Have We Learned from Japanese Monetary Policy?

Interest rate targeting is widely used by central banks to pursue price stability; however, the variation in inflation policy outcomes between central banks such as the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan despite a common policy instrument framework suggests interest- targeting has limitations. Despite the variation in policy outcomes, the role of targeting was enhanced with the advent of Taylor rules in the 1990s and interest rate targeting dominates central bank attitudes to the exclusion of any other policy instrument framework. The recent Japanese experience confronts us with the need to reassess the relative merits of interest targeting. This paper frames the discussion of the various problems of the interest-targeting framework within a model that encompasses a number of important previous results and stresses that interest rate targeting may leave the price level indeterminate in various plausible circumstances. In a low, or even zero interest rate environment, such as the one that characterized Japan, Taylor-type rules may offer no solution to the indeterminacy problem. The paper then discusses various aspects of the BoJ’s decision to adhere to interest rate targeting despite its limitations.Interest-targeting, Monetary Policy, Deflation, Japan

Quantitative easing: a rationale and some evidence from Japan

This paper reviews the rationale for quantitative easing when central bank policy rates reach near zero levels in light of recent announcements regarding direct asset purchases by the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. Empirical evidence from the previous period of quantitative easing in Japan between 2001 and 2006 is presented. During this earlier period the Bank of Japan was able to expand the monetary base very quickly and significantly. Quantitative easing translated into a greater and more lasting expansion of M1 relative to nominal GDP. Deflation subsided by 2005. As soon as inflation appeared to stabilize near a rate of zero, the Bank of Japan rapidly reduced the monetary base as a share of nominal income as it had announced in 2001. The Bank was able to exit from extensive quantitative easing within less than a year. Some implications for the current situation in Europe and the United States are discussed

Deflation and relative prices : evidence from Japan and Hong Kong

We test the menu cost model of Ball and Mankiw (1994, 1995), which implies that the impact of price dispersion on inflation should differ between inflation and deflation episodes, using data for Japan and Hong Kong. We use a random cross-section sample split when calculating the moments of the distribution of price changes to mitigate the small-cross-sectionsample bias noted by Cecchetti and Bryan (1999). The parameter on the third moment is positive and significant in both countries during both the inflation and deflation periods, and the parameter on the second moment changes sign in the deflation period, as the theory predicts. Keywords: inflation, deflation, menu costs, Hong Kong, Japan JEL Numbers: E3

Keynesian Models of Deflation and Depression Revisited: Inside Debt and Price Flexibility

This paper extends Tobin’s (1975) Keynesian analysis of deflation to include a range of additional channels through which deflation exacerbates Keynesian unemployment. The paper provides further theoretical reasons why downward price level adjustment may not solve the Keynesian problem. These arguments challenge the received wisdom that Keynes’ General Theory is a special case resting on downwardly rigid prices and nominal wages. This conventional wisdom has led many economists to recommend policies promoting downward flexibility. These policies have created an environment in which deflation is more likely, giving new relevance to Keynesian analysis of deflation.deflation, liquidity trap, Fisher debt effect, price flexibility

Moderate inflation and the deflation-depression link

In a recent paper, Atkeson and Kehoe (2004) demonstrated the lack of a robust empirical relationship between inflation and growth for a cross-section of countries with 19th and 20th century data, concluding that the historical evidence only provides weak support for the contention that deflation episodes are harmful to economic growth. In this paper, we revisit this relationship by allowing for inflation and growth to have a nonlinear specification dependent on inflation levels. In particular, we allow for the possibility that high inflation is negatively correlated with growth, while a positive relationship exists over the range of negative-to-moderate inflation. Our results confirm a positive relationship between inflation and growth at moderate inflation levels, and support the contention that the relationship between inflation and growth is non-linear over the entire sample range.Inflation (Finance)

The Minimum Inflation Rate for Euroland

As a result of the Balassa effect relative prices change rapidly between and within the euro countries. Thus it is impossible to find a common monetary policy that will result in price stability in all countries. Based on empirical estimates of the Balassa model, the paper calculates a minimum aggregate inflation rate which is compatible with the requirement that no country face a deflation. This minimum aggeragate inflation rate is 0.94% in the euro-11 countries and 1.13% in an extended Europe which incorporates the east European countries.Inflation target, Balassa-Samuelson effect, ECB

Deflation in China

This article investigates the causes of the deflation which occurs in China since 1998. The analysis is based on a theoretical model which addresses supply shocks as well as demand shocks and on the estimation of a reduced equation of consumer prices variations for the period 1986-2002, the results of which corroborate the theoretical assumptions. The main conclusion is that the slowing down of inflation and the fall of prices are chiefly explained by China economic policy. Moreover and contrary to the current opinion we show that deflation is partly due to the deceleration of productivity growth.productivity growth, exchange rate anchorage, deflation, China

Overcoming the Zero Bound on Nominal Interest Rates: Gesell's Currency Carry Tax vs. Eisler's arallel Virtual Currency

Despite the zero lower bound on the short nominal interest rate in Japan having become a binding constraint, conventional monetary policy in Japan, in the form of generalised open market purchases of government securities of all maturities, has never been pushed to the limit where all outstanding government debt and all current and anticipated future government deficits are (or are confidently expected to be) monetised. Open market purchases of private securities can create serious governance problems. Two ways of overcoming the zero lower bound constraint have been proposed. The first is Gesell's carry tax on currency. The second is Eisler's proposal for the unbundling of the medium of exchange/means of payment function and the numeraire function of money through the creation of a parallel virtual currency. This raises the fundamental issue of who chooses or what determines the numeraire used in private wage and price contracts - an issue that is either not addressed in the literature or addressed incorrectly. On balance, Gesell's proposal appears to be the more robust of the two.zero bound, deflation, carry tax on currency, parallel virtual currency

Pareto Efficiency vs. the Ad Hoc Standard Monetary Objective An Analysis of Inflation Targeting

The standard ad hoc monetary objective function creates a bias in favor of inflation targeting. Instead, this paper uses the Pareto criterion to assess inflation targeting (IT), price-level targeting (PLT), and nominal-income targeting (NIT). The effect that unanticipated inflation or deflation benefits one party to a nominal contract while hurting the other party is an effect that cannot be captured in a model with a representative consumer or identical consumers. To capture this effect, this paper analyses models with diverse consumers in a pure-exchange economy without storage. When nominal aggregate demand (NAD) is stochastic but real aggregate supply (RAS) is not, PLT Pareto dominates IT. This is because IT perpetuates price errors and hence nominal aggregate demand errors, while PLT tries to return to the original targeted price path. By perpetuating these errors, IT perpetuates the welfare losses, whereas PLT corrects so to help reduce these welfare losses in the future. When RAS is also stochastic, nominal contracts under NIT can lead to Pareto efficiency when consumers have average relative risk aversion, non-stochastic endowment-to-RAS ratios, and no utility shocks. Under the same assumptions IT and PLT lead to Pareto inefficiencies because they force the payers of nominal contracts to guarantee the real value of those payments to the receivers. In essence this transfers RAS risk from the receivers of the nominal obligations to payers of the nominal obligations. However, this transfer of risk would only be appropriate if all payers of nominal obligations had below average relative risk aversion and all receivers had above average relative risk aversion, a situation that rarely will hold.Pareto efficiency, inflation targeting, price-level targeting, nominal-income targeting, monetary objective function