Inflation Dynamics in Romania – a New Keynesian Perspective

We investigate in this paper the main factors which drive inflation in Romania: inflation persistence, inflation expectations and real economy variables. We estimate a reduced form hybrid New Keynesian Phillips Curve in order to determine the degree of inertia and the impact of forward looking expectations. As a proxy for real economic activity, we alternatively use the change in the real labour cost, output gap, the capacity utilization rate, the economic sentiment indicator and the unemployment gap. We find that the capacity utilization rate and the unemployment gap are good proxies for the real economic activity. Inflation inertia is more important in explaining CPI inflation than rational expectations confirming the fact that inflation expectations in Romania are still highly adaptive.