Economic Growth, Inflation, and Monetary Policy in Pakistan: Preliminary Empirical Estimates

There is a growing debate in the emerging market on the choice of an appropriate monetary or exchange rate policy that could lead to a sustainable economic growth. Inflation targeting has become one of these policy alternatives and has recently been implemented in some of the emerging markets in Asia and Latin America. Given the recent remarkable economic performance of the Pakistan, this issue has also been discussed at various policy forums in Pakistan. An important pre-condition for the success of inflation-targeting is to identify the leading indicators of inflation and develop a model to reasonably forecast inflation. This is the main objective of this paper. Besides an overview of the experience, the main focus of the paper is to provide some preliminary empirical estimates for inflation equation and its causal relationship with other macroeconomic variables.