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Globalisation and inflation: New cross-country evidence on the global determinants of domestic inflation

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  • Claudio E. V. Borio
  • Andrew Filardo
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    Abstract

    There has been mounting evidence that the inflation process has been changing. Inflation is now much lower and much more stable around the globe. And its sensitivity to measures of economic slack and increases in input costs appears to have declined. Probably the most widely supported explanation for this phenomenon is that monetary policy has been much more effective. There is no doubt in our mind that this explanation goes a long way towards explaining the better inflation performance we have observed. In this paper, however, we begin to explore a complementary, rather than alternative, explanation. We argue that prevailing models of inflation are too "country-centric", in the sense that they fail to take sufficient account of the role of global factors in influencing the inflation process. The relevance of a more "globe-centric" approach is likely to have increased as the process of integration of the world economy has gathered momentum, a process commonly referred to as "globalisation". In a large cross-section of countries, we find some rather striking prima facie evidence that this has indeed been the case. In particular, proxies for global economic slack add considerable explanatory power to traditional benchmark inflation rate equations, even allowing for the influence of traditional indicators of external influences on domestic inflation, such as import and oil prices. Moreover, the role of such global factors has been growing over time, especially since the 1990s. And in a number of cases, global factors appear to have supplanted the role of domestic measures of economic slack.

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    Bibliographic Info

    Paper provided by Bank for International Settlements in its series BIS Working Papers with number 227.

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    Length: 54 pages
    Date of creation: May 2007
    Date of revision:
    Handle: RePEc:bis:biswps:227

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    Keywords: Globalisation; inflation; monetary policy; Phillips curve;

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    1. Athanasios Orphanides & David H. Small & Volker Wieland & David W. Wilcox, 1997. "A quantitative exploration of the opportunistic approach to disinflation," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 1997-36, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    2. Chen, Natalie & Imbs, Jean & Scott, Andrew, 2004. "Competition, Globalization and the Decline of Inflation," CEPR Discussion Papers 4695, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    3. Toshitaka Sekine, 2006. "Time-varying exchange rate pass-through: experiences of some industrial countries," BIS Working Papers 202, Bank for International Settlements.
    4. Ian Dew-Becker & Robert J. Gordon, 2005. "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go? Inflation Dynamics and the Distribution of Income," NBER Working Papers 11842, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Charles Engel & John H. Rogers & Shing-Yi B. Wang, 2003. "Revisiting the Border: an assessment of the law of one price using very disaggregated consumer price data," International Finance Discussion Papers 777, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    6. Joseph E. Gagnon & Jane Ihrig, 2001. "Monetary policy and exchange rate pass-through," International Finance Discussion Papers 704, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    7. Diego Winkelried & Marco Vega, 2004. "How Does Global Disinflation Drag Inflation in Small Open Economies?," Econometric Society 2004 Latin American Meetings 76, Econometric Society.
    8. Gabriele Galati & William R. Melick, 2006. "The evolving inflation process: an overview," BIS Working Papers 196, Bank for International Settlements.
    9. Cristina T. Terra, 1998. "Openness And Inflation: A New Assessment," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 113(2), pages 641-648, May.
    10. T. W.Swan, 1960. "Economic Control In A Dependent Economy," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 36(73), pages 51-66, 03.
    11. Pollock, D. S. G., 2000. "Trend estimation and de-trending via rational square-wave filters," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 99(2), pages 317-334, December.
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    1. Unemployment & inflation: the non-trade-off
      by chris dillow in Stumbling and Mumbling on 2010-05-12 12:33:47
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