Global Inflation, Regional Factors

This paper shows that global inflation dynamics have a sizable regional component. Using a balanced panel of 61 countries that starts in 1970, we document that while the global factor, defined as the dominant principal component, explains a large portion of inflation variation in advanced economies, a model with only one principal component is less successful for developing countries. By contrast, a hierarchical dynamic factor model, which includes a global (unconstrained) factor and regional (restricted) factors, performs substantially better for emerging market and developing economies. The regional factors are linked to commodity prices and help improve the accuracy of inflation forecasts at the country level. Employing an unsupervised machine-learning technique, we show that the estimated clusters of countries, grouped according to similarities in inflation dynamics, exhibit a strong regional pattern. Our findings suggest that policymakers in developing countries should pay close attention to inflation dynamics in their neighboring countries.