Journal Archive

Home > Journal Archive
Cover Image
  • P-ISSN 1738-656X
Cite

한국개발연구. Vol. 32, No. 3, September 2010, pp. 1-32

https://doi.org/10.23895/kdijep.2010.32.3.1

× KDI Open Access is a program of fully open access journals to facilitate the widest possible dissemination of high-quality research. All research articles published in KDI JEP are immediately, permanently and freely available online for everyone to read, download and share in terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Measures of Underlying Inflation and Evaluation of Inflation Targeting with Global Crisis in Korea

Won-Am Park

Author & Article History

Manuscript .

Abstract

The global financial crisis has exerted enormous impacts on the attainment of inflation target in Korea. The annual average CPI inflation was 3.3% during the targeting period of 2007-2009 and the target was 3.0±0.5%. Thus Korea has succeeded in keeping annual average CPI inflation just below the upper limit of the 2007-2009 target under the global crisis. This paper intends to evaluate the performance of the inflation targeting system in Korea. First, it estimates the conventional call rate reaction equation under the global crisis and finds that the policy interest rates never reacted to expected inflation, output gap, and won/dollar exchange rate, as expected by theory. Second, it identifies the shock of global financial crisis into core and non-core, applying the structural VAR model. The core shock was defined to have no (medium- to) long-run impact on real output. The core shock was identified to have the character of the demand shock, since it has the positive impact on the inflation and output in the short run. The structural core inflation due to core shock was an attractor of headline inflation, not vice versa. Therefore, the structural core inflation that reflects the demand-side shock would be the better intermediate target for the final headline inflation target than the official core inflation that excludes the volatile inflation of agricultural and oil-related products. During the inflation targeting period of 2007-2009, the structural core inflation was more volatile than the official core inflation, because the global crisis has very large negative impacts on the domestic demand as well as the prices of agricultural and oil-related products. This paper shows that the negative core shock during the fourth quarter of 2008 was larger than that in the financial crisis in 1998. But the core shock turned into positive very quickly in 2009, as the Korean economy recovered very quickly from crisis The volatile changes in structural core inflation suggests that the Bank of Korea barely managed to attain the 2007-2009 inflation target, owing to the very large negative impacts of the global financial crisis on the domestic demand. It also suggests that the rapid rise in core inflation with the rapid recovery of the Korean economy will lead to rapid rise in headline inflation.

Keywords

근원인플레이션(Underlying Inflation), 글로벌 금융위기(Global Financial Crisis), 물가안정목표제(Inflation Targeting System), 구조적 벡터자기회귀모형(Structural VAR Model)

JEL Code

E31, E32, E58

상단으로 이동

KDIJEP