This is really just a quick information post.
The Reserve Bank’s website has a complete set of Monetary Policy Statements from and including December 1996 onwards, but for some reason they have not put online the first few years of Monetary Policy Statements (which began being published, under the provisions of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act 1989, in April 1990). New Zealand’s inflation targeting regime (origins and early development here) took formal shape (with attendant legal obligations) when that Act came into effect, and the first Policy Targets Agreement between the Governor and the Minister of Finance was signed on 2 March 1990.
In the early years of inflation targeting there were (as the law required) only two Monetary Policy Statements a year. At the start, these documents were very light on specific forecast content. The Monetary Policy Statements were complemented by published Economic Forecasts documents, which had been released twice a year for some years (but which then had little impact on anything, and were once – in a meeting with the Minister of Finance I was attending – memorably disowned by the Bank’s Deputy Governor as “just the Economics Department’s view”). With the commencement of formal inflation targeting, and a growing recognition of the crucial importance of inflation forecasts in an inflation-targeting regime, the Economic Forecasts document took on a somewhat greater degree of prominence. For some years (until 1997) the Bank published both documents, in time on a schedule of alternating quarters (before eventually moving to the still-current model of four Monetary Policy Statements a year).
The Economic Forecasts documents for the period 1990 to 1997 are thus potentially of use to anyone seeking to study the entire New Zealand inflation targeting experience, and particularly the experience in the early years when we pathbreaking to some extent (often more like “groping in the murk”), and running a monetary policy implementation approach that was idiosyncratic to say the least. Neither they nor the early Monetary Policy Statements have been readily available.
I had had in my own files hard copies of some of these publications (with bits and pieces stuffed in them, including the September 1992 forecasts for which I was responsible and which the then Opposition Finance spokesman had described as “looking as though a public relations firm had written it” – on this occasion reality (notably fiscal reality) turned out better than the numbers he hadn’t liked)
But this complete set became available through the efforts of my son, who is doing an honours thesis in 2024 on some technical aspects of New Zealand monetary policy in recent decades. He requested the documents from the Bank and was provided with the full set from 1990 to 1997 (and my understanding is that it took a bit of work from the Bank, for which thanks). With his permission I am posting them here as a more permanent record and to make them generally available to anyone interested.
There is a full page, with a link on the front of this website, with links to all these documents
croaking cassandra 