Does Inflation Targeting Make a Difference?

Yes, as inferred from panel evidence for inflation-targeting countries and a control group of high-achieving industrial countries that do not target inflation. Our evidence suggests that inflation targeting helps countries achieve lower inflation in the long run, have a smaller inflation response to oil-price and exchange-rate shocks, strengthen monetary policy independence, improve monetary policy efficiency, and obtain inflation outcomes closer to target levels. Some benefits of inflation targeting are larger when inflation targeters have achieved disinflation and are able to make their inflation targets stationary. Despite these favorable results for inflation targeting, our evidence generally does not suggest that countries that adopt inflation targeting have attained better monetary policy performance relative to our control group of highly successful non-inflation targeters. However, inflation targeting does seem to help all country groups to move toward the performance of the control group. The performance attained by industrial-country inflation targeters generally dominates the performance of emerging-economy inflation targeters and is similar to that of industrial non-inflation targeting countries.