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Inflation Targeting, Employment Creation and Economic Development: Assessing the Impacts and Policy Alternatives

The papers in this special issue report on the results of a three-year international research project designed to evaluate the impacts of the inflation targeting (IT) approach to central banking that has swept the global economic landscape in the last decade or so. Moving beyond critique, though, our main motivation for this project has been to develop socially productive alternatives to inflation targeting, because, as we describe more fully in the following pages, we believe IT has largely had negative consequences for economic development, equality, and poverty reduction, especially in the developing world. In structuring the project, we have been anxious to avoid the ‘one size fits all’ approach that underlies not only inflation targeting itself but also much of the policy approach of the neo-liberal ‘Washington Consensus’ of which inflation targeting has become a key part. To that end, the authors of the country study papers have been tasked with designing concrete, countryspecific alternatives to inflation targeting. Other authors have written studies of long neglected themes in central banking, including the gender impacts and class aspects of monetary policy. Initiated and directed by Gerald Epstein of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) and Economics Department of the University of Massachusetts and Erinc Yeldan of Bilkent University in Turkey, this Alternatives to Inflation Targeting Project has benefited from the numerous presentations and discussions we have had over these several years in various parts of the world with many economists, activists and practitioners. More generally, a multi-author, multi-country project such as ours requires many other things to be successful, including, first and foremost, creative, skilled and dedicated researchers, which we are fortunate to have found. The work of many of them appears in these pages.1 In addition it takes financial resources to mount a project such as this, and we thank the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) and the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) for financial support. The project has also benefited from the help and encouragement of many people and we especially thank Jomo, K.S. of UN-DESA, Manuel Montes and Michael Conroy previously of the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund respectively, and Jo-Marie Greisgraber and Jamie Baker of New Rules for Global Finance. Our graduate students, Hasan Comert and Luis Rosero have contributed first rate research assistance and Judy Fogg of PERI has provided untold, key support along the way. And finally, we thank Malcolm Sawyer, editor of this Journal for his crucial encouragement and support of this special issue. To all of these individuals, we give many thanks.