Monetary policy rule and its performance under inflation targeting: the evidence of Thailand

This article reviews the Thailand monetary policy rule and its performance under the adoption of inflation targeting regime since 2000. The study estimates the policy reaction function to see if the inflation targeting has been linked with an inflation-responsive monetary policy rule, and investigates whether the monetary policy rule would actually have its transmission effect on inflation, through tracing the impulse responses of inflation rate to monetary policy shocks in vector autoregressive (VAR) and structural VAR models. The study contributes to the literature by updating the assessment of the Thailand monetary policy through covering the period after 2015, when the Bank of Thailand has upgraded its inflation targeting framework by transforming it from range target to point target to provide a clearer policy signal to the public. The main findings are as follows. The estimation outcomes of the policy reaction function show that the Thailand monetary policy rule under the inflation targeting is characterized as an inflation- and exchange-rate- responsive rule with forward-looking manner, which is countercyclical against inflation in the long run, but is accompanied with slow adjustment toward a target policy rate. The results from the impulse response analyses imply that the Thailand monetary policy under the inflation targeting has only a marginal transmission effect on inflation probably due to the slow adjustment of policy rate.