Estimates of the Phillips curve suggest that the low level of unemployment over the last few years should have produced a fairly significant increase in the rate of inflation, yet inflation has continued to fall. Some take this occurrence as evidence that the NAIRU has declined. Others argue that social factors, such as recent movements of employee health coverage to health maintenance organizations have temporarily masked inflation. Perhaps the most widely cited explanation for the surprisingly good inflation performance of late concerns the increasing sensitivity of the U.S. economy to foreign economic conditions; specifically, many have argued that since capacity utilization abroad has been slack in recent years, U.S. inflation has remained mild. This study uses a variety of approaches to examine whether U.S. inflation depends on foreign, rather than domestic capacity constraints. The author shows that foreign capacity plays little, if any, role in the determination of U.S. inflation independent of any role it might play in the determination of U.S. capacity utilization. He cautions that anyone who believes in a world where we no longer need worry about domestic capacity constraints will eventually be rudely awakened by data that suggests otherwise. His results indicate that the Phillips curve, relating some measure of U.S. capacity to U.S. inflation, is alive, if ailing a bit, even as the world gets more integrated.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Olivier J. Blanchard & Lawrence H. Summers, 1986.
"Hysteresis And The European Unemployment Problem,"
NBER Chapters,
in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1986, Volume 1, pages 15-90
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!]
Other versions:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)