UK Inflation in the 1970s and 1980s: The Role of Output Gap Mismeasurement

Understanding the degree of measurement error in the estimates of the output gap available to policymakers in ‘real time’ is important both for the formulation of monetary policy and for the study of inflation behaviour. For the United Kingdom, no official output gap series was published for most of the period 1965–2000. An approximate series can, however, be deduced from analysis of statistical releases and policymakers’ statements. On this basis, we construct a real-time UK output gap series for 1965–2000. We find that monetary policy errors due to output gap mismeasurement contributed approximately 3.0 to 7.1 percentage points to average UK inflation in the 1970s and 0.7–5.5 percentage points to inflation in the 1980s.