A win-win monetary policy in Canada

TL;DR

This paper develops an integral econometric model linking inflation, unemployment, and labor force in Canada, revealing that inflation targeting introduced in 1991 caused a beneficial structural break reducing both inflation and unemployment.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integral technique for detecting structural breaks in macroeconomic time series, enhancing Phillips curve models with empirical calibration.

Findings

Inflation targeting in 1991 led to lower inflation and unemployment.

Structural breaks are effectively detected using cumulative curve analysis.

The new monetary policy is a win-win for Canada.

Abstract

The Lucas critique has exposed the problem of the trade-off between changes in monetary policy and structural breaks in economic time series. The search for and characterisation of such breaks has been a major econometric task ever since. We have developed an integral technique similar to CUSUM using an empirical model quantitatively linking the rate of inflation and unemployment to the change in the level of labour force in Canada. Inherently, our model belongs to the class of Phillips curve models, and the link between the involved variables is a linear one with all coefficients of individual and generalized models obtained by empirical calibration. To achieve the best LSQ fit between measured and predicted time series cumulative curves are used as a simplified version of the 1-D boundary elements (integral) method. The distance between the cumulative curves (in L2 metrics) is very sensitive to structural breaks since it accumulates true differences and suppresses uncorrelated noise and systematic errors. Our previous model of inflation and unemployment in Canada is enhanced by the introduction of structural breaks and is validated by new data in the past and future. The most exiting finding is that the introduction of inflation targeting as a new monetary policy in 1991 resulted in a structural break manifested in a lowered rate of price inflation accompanied by a substantial fall in the rate of unemployment. Therefore, the new monetary policy in Canada is a win-win one.