Browsing by Author "Nikolenko, Anton"

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union Russian economy has suffered from high and volatile inflation. In 2014 the Russian central bank announced that it will stop supporting the national currency through market operations and adopt an inflation targeting regime in the beginning of 2015. The announcement of the policy drew a widespread critique in public discussion stating that inflation in Russia has too many sources of non-monetary inflation for an inflation targeting policy to be effective. In this thesis I provide a literature review on the inflation targeting regimes and the non-monetary inflation sources. Further, I analyze non-monetary inflation sources in the context of Russia and present the data available on these sources. In the empirical part of this study I use data on budget deficit, the amount of newly passed laws and prices for housing and utility services in vector autoregression models to find out if these non-monetary inflation sources are statistically significant factors in explaining the changes in inflation expectations in Russia. My results indicate that the role of the non-monetary inflation sources in the effectiveness of the inflation targeting regime has been overstated in the critique voiced at the time of the regime change. While there is a persistent gap between the inflation expectations of consumers and central banks inflation target or the official consumer price index changes, the model that excludes the non-monetary sources is a best fit to explain the expectations.