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Canadian Policy Debates and Case Studies in Honour of David Laidler pp 171–214Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Political Economy of Inflation Targets: New Zealand and the UK

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Abstract

One of the several occasions on which my path, as a monetary economist, crossed that of David Laidler relates to the adoption in New Zealand of an inflation target, which was effectively introduced in 1988 and then confirmed by the Act of 1989. There is now a detailed record of the events surrounding the passage of this Act, in Singleton, Grimes, Hawke and Holmes, ‘The Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act, 1989’, (2006), and a somewhat more wide-ranging paper by the same authors, ‘Twenty years of modernisation: The Reserve Bank of New Zealand’ (2005). In this latter paper, the authors note that ‘key reforms have often been tested on leading thinkers internationally before implementation. (For instance, aspects of the reforms contained in the 1989 Reserve Bank Act were run past each of Charles Goodhart, David Laidler and Alan [sic] Meltzer)’.

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Authors
  1. C. A. E. Goodhart
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  2. Charles Freedman
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Notre Dame Australia University, Australia

    Robert Leeson (Adjunct Professor of Economics) (Adjunct Professor of Economics)

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© 2010 C. A. E. Goodhart

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Goodhart, C.A.E., Freedman, C. (2010). The Political Economy of Inflation Targets: New Zealand and the UK. In: Leeson, R. (eds) Canadian Policy Debates and Case Studies in Honour of David Laidler. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230274303_7

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