A little late on this: Here is The Economist calling for NGDP targeting:
A target for nominal GDP (or the sum of all money earned in an economy each year, before accounting for inflation) is less radical than it sounds. It was a plausible alternative when inflation targets became common in the 1990s. A target for NGDP growth (ie, growth in cash income) copes better with cheap imports, which boost growth, but depress prices, pulling today’s central banks in two directions at once. Nominal income is also more important to debtors’ economic health than either inflation or growth, because debts are fixed in cash terms.
Critics fret that NGDP is hard to measure, subject to revision, and mind-bogglingly unfamiliar to the public. Yet if NGDP sounds off-putting, growth in income does not. And although inflation can be measured easily enough, central banks now rely nearly as much on estimates of labour-market “slack”, an impossibly hazy number. Most important, an NGDP target would free central banks from the confusion caused by the broken inflation gauge. To set policy today central banks must work out how they think inflation will respond to falling unemployment, and markets must guess at their thinking. An NGDP target would not require the distinction between forecasts for growth (and hence employment) and forecasts for inflation.
Faster NGDP growth could come from better productivity, more hiring or faster inflation; all of which rich economies could use a bit more of. Setting a different target does not mean central banks will automatically reach it. And their unconventional toolkit looks depleted. Quantitative easing, which is still in use in Europe and Japan, is falling out of favour because of worries about asset prices (see article). Interest rates cannot be cut far below zero without radical changes in the nature of money (the Bank of England’s chief economist recently suggested eliminating cash). But getting the target right is an important start. Patiently waiting for inflation to turn up is no longer good enough.
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