The establishment of the European Central Bank (ECB) presents a rare opportunity to define the operations of a central bank with no prior track record. Before the ECB specifies an, as yet undefined, operational target this paper asks what might be learnt from the recent experience of inflation...

The paper discusses the choice between inflation targeting and monetary targeting as a strategy for the Eurosystem, the actual strategy the Eurosystem announced in the fall of 1998, the framework for policy decisions appropriate for achieving the goals of the Eurosystem, the role of exchange...

Using a small empirical model of inflation, output, and money estimated on US data, we compare the relative performance of monetary targeting and inflation targeting. The results show that monetary targeting would be quite inefficient, with both higher inflation and output variability. This is...