Definition of price stability, range and point inflation targets

Announcing a quantitative objective for price developments has become a common practice in modern monetary policy making. While the specific features of such announced objectives vary across countries, a common rationale for this is to help anchoring inflation expectations. We use survey data on long-term inflation expectations in 15 industrial countries since the early nineties to investigate how well anchored are inflation expectations. We find that in all countries except Japan long-term inflation expectations are well anchored and, generally, increasingly so over the past decade. When comparing this evidence across types of announcements of the inflation objectives, we find that the specific features of announcements have no visible effect on the performance at anchoring inflation expectations. In particular, there does not seem to be evidence that the announcement of a quantitative objective in the form of a point or of a range for admissible inflation rates makes any appreciable difference.