Inflation Targeting: Does It Matter?

In the last thirty years a monetary policy regime called 'Inflation Targeting' came into common practice in more than thirty countries around the whole world. Its fundamental ideas became the new orthodoxy in central banking. However, after the Financial crisis in 2007-2008 and the following recession in many industrialized countries inflation targeting expirienced a fundamental critical review. The present work analyzes the development of this monetary policy regime in twelve countries and its evolution until mid-2012 focusing on the impact of the crisis on the relevant economic variables. The quantitative asessment of the latter shows a significant attention shift of monetary policymakers from nominal inflation towards economy's real variables, such as output and unemployment rate.