Inflation Targeting and Communication: Should the Public Read Inflation Reports or Tea Leaves?

Inflation-targeting central banks have a respectable track record at explaining their policy actions and corresponding inflation outturns. Using a simple forward-looking policy rule and an assessment of inflation reports, we provide a new methodology for the empirical evaluation of consistency in central bank communication. We find that the three communication tools—inflation targets, inflation forecasts, and verbal assessments of inflation factors contained in quarterly inflation reports—provided a consistent message in five out of six observations in our 2000–05 sample of Chile, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Thailand, and Sweden.