Understanding Inflation and Controlling It

Inflation management is one of the hardest tasks an economic policymaker has to undertake. It appears, at first sight, that one can rely entirely on commonsense to carry out this task. But that will be a cardinal mistake. While inflation policy does require judgment and intuition, it is essential that these be backed up with statistical information and an understanding of economic theory. This paper tries to bring together the formal analytics that underlie inflation policy. It surveys some of the standard ideas and also questions some of these and, in the process, tries to push further outwards the frontiers of our understanding.