Inflation targeting policies in world and Turkey and efficiency of Turkey application

The activist monetary policies that were imposed in the 1970s increased inflation rate on one hand, and failed to diminish the unemployment rate on the other hand; consequently, the stagflation crisis was experienced. This situation, as the Monetarists put forward in theory, shows that, in practice, monetary policy may be effective on prices only in the long run. These developments that were experienced both in theory and practice led to the emergence of a consensus in literature that " the primary goal of monetary policy is price stability". Thus, in a stuation that inflation was a serious problem, most of the countries began to impose monetary policies that gave priority to price stability. To that end, countries used monetary targeting and exchange rate targeting, but nevertheless, these strategies failed. The last policy to be imposed is inflation targeting that was adopted for the first time by New Zealand in 1990. After an unsuccessesful monetary targeting and exchange rate targeting experience, Turkey adopted "implicit inflation targeting" in 2002. Having implemented the preconditions for inflation targeting, Turkey adobted officially "open inflation targeting" in 2006. The objective of this study is to evaluate macroecomomic performance of inflation targeting that has earlier been applied in Turkey. For this purpose, in the regression analysis that was performed, the results obtained are as follows: inflation targeting has decreased inflation rate, inflation persistance and interest rate; however, any important relationship has not been determined to exist between growth rate and inflation targeting. All these findings were found to be consistent with the prominent arguments in literature. In conclusion, through our study, inflation targeting was determined to have favourable effect on macroeconomic performance in Turkey. Key Words: Monetary Policy, Price Stability, Inflation Targeting, Macroeconomic Performance