Published Date: 29 April 2021
"Inflation & Expectations" - Opening Remarks
by Mr Edward S Robinson, Deputy Managing
Director (Economic Policy) & Chief Economist,
Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the
Seminar on Inflation and Cost of Living in
Singapore and Asia on 29 April 2021
Introduction
1. Thank you for inviting the MAS to join this virtual webinar and live discussion on
"Inflation and Cost of Living", a joint initiative of the Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial
Economics, the IMF Institute and DBS Bank. It is encouraging that academia, industry and an
intergovernmental organisation have come together on an important issue of common
concern.
2. I recall launching the Singapore Index of Inflation Expectations or SInDEx, as it was
known then at SMU in January 2012, and it is heartening to see it nurtured over the past
decade. The MAS is grateful to the SKBI for its commitment to this project and to DBS for its
generous sponsorship of the DBS-SKBI-SMU Singapore Index of Inflation Expectations, that
counts among the key indicators that MAS looks at in its economic surveillance.
3. My comments are in two parts. First, I will make some broad observations on the
somewhat complex inflation dynamics that confront us since the onset of COVID-19. Second,
I intend to reiterate the important role that expectations play in driving the behaviour of key
macroeconomic phenomena, including inflation. This two-part intervention is meant to
bridge the interests and inclinations of the various participants at this Seminar - industry,
academia and policy.
Understanding Recent Inflation Developments
4. We just released our April Monetary Policy Statement and Macroeconomic Review,
which contain our latest assessment of inflation on the global and domestic fronts. There are
distinct peculiarities about the impact of the COVID-19 shock on price adjustments. Let me
highlight four broad factors pertinent to price developments during the crisis and beyond.
5. First, price adjustments reflected the impact of the government health measures which
imposed a sudden stop to a range of contact-intensive activities. This meant that overall, the
adjustments in many countries took place mostly through a sharp retraction in "Q" or the
level of activity, rather than "P", or prices.
A statistical factor was partly at play here. As activities in some sectors saw near-complete
cessation (for example, recreational services and air travel expenses), prices in several
key consumer services categories were unobservable, such that their values had to be
imputed based on the price direction of other sub-indices in the overall CPI.
6. Even so there were discernible shis in relative prices in response to some of the activity
restrictions. We did see a rather quick decline in prices of some consumer services for which
spending was restricted, alongside the fall in prices of some retail goods.
7. On the upside, there were price rises associated with the early supply- side disruptions
and frictional costs of adjusting supply chains, that fortunately proved mostly transitory and
"second order" in terms of contributions to overall inflation. But these cost-push factors
could well rise again and thus bear close monitoring.
8. In the labour market, it is noteworthy that wages did not fall in several major
economies. Wage growth was 4.8% in the US last year, 2.7% in the Eurozone, 4.3% in China,
and 1.4% in Singapore. Part of this reflected some degree of nominal wage rigidity, induced
by the roll-out of substantive wage subsidies meant to reduce the incidence of job
separation in the initial stages of the crisis.
Another statistical issue may have led to mismeasurement here. As a disproportionate
number of lower wage workers became unemployed during the crisis, more so than
during earlier downturns, compositional changes in employment would have led to
overestimates of wage growth. The usual aggregate average wage series are typically not
[1]
based on a fixed set of jobs or workers in continuous full-time employment.
9. Second, at this stage, the risk of disinflation has receded as prices are off their local
minima and underlying cost and consumer price pressures are picking up, though only
gradually alongside the growth rebound. The IMF generally expects contained inflation
[2]
pressures in most countries . Higher commodity prices will mechanically raise consumer
price indices in the short term. But this step-up should not ignite an acceleration in cost and
price pressures, given the remaining slack in key factor and product markets.
10. Third, there are important upside risks to this baseline assessment of inflation. We
have seen within this region, a recent increase in the upstream producer prices in China,
which points to temporary frictional costs as well as some effect from commodity prices, but
also the possibilities of the early emergence of underlying cost-push pressures. Demand-pull
price increases could pick up and rise to the fore in the latter part of the year if the growth
recovery continues apace, and it could interact with the concurrent firming in short-run
supply-side costs. Indeed, these risks take on a particular relevance at the current
conjuncture, because the near-term trajectory for inflation represents one of the key
uncertainties for financial markets. Markets may be particularly vulnerable to signs of
accelerating inflation in the data, which could trigger some volatility in asset prices.
11. Fourth, the interaction of the cyclical dynamics with longer-term secular trends on
prices is likely to reassert going forward. Before COVID-19, many countries faced persistently
low price inflation, a trend driven by a complex mix of secular factors, such as technological
progress, especially automation and digitisation, wage inequality, and demographic trends.
All of these factors bring about important long-term relative price shis in their wake. But
post-COVID, their pass-through into a general increase in prices comes against another key
set of filters. These include the slope of the Phillips Curve, central bank's policy responses
together with the constraints imposed by elevated public debt levels, and importantly,
agents' expectations.
Expectations in Macroeconomics
12. This brings me to my second set of comments. One of the truly revolutionary
developments in macroeconomic analysis has been the recognition that expectations are
central to the behaviour of agents. Most of us would probably reach back to at least Keynes'
General Theory, as marking its formal induction into general equilibrium macroeconomics.
The theory and practice of macroeconomic expectations has evolved quite rapidly since
then. In particular, Robert Shiller and George Akerlof were key figures in formalising the idea
that changes in expectations may manifest as exogenous shocks rather than factor in
endogenously as posited by the theory of rational expectations, thus giving analytical form
[3]
to Keynes' "animal spirits" in macroeconomic research.
13. More recently, Shiller and Akerlof have also led a revival in the interest of expectations
[4]
in economics . Placing a modern contextualisation to "animal spirits", they describe it as
"a restless and inconsistent element in the economy. It refers to our peculiar relationship
with ambiguity or uncertainty. Sometimes we are paralyzed by it. Yet at other times it
refreshes and energizes us, overcoming our fears and indecisions." I think we can quite easily
relate to such descriptions. We have seen the importance of expectations in determining
aggregate outcomes during crisis, as well as in specific markets and cycles. I am quite sure
that there has been a distinctive step-up in the recourse to notions of expectations and
sentiments by forecasters in explaining their muted or upbeat prognosis for macroeconomic
variables in the period ahead.
formations, within familiar analytical frameworks . Specifically, Shleifer shows how
representativeness thinking may cause agents to over-weight the probability of good
fortune, due to selective retrieval of information from memory, inducing excessive optimism
[6]
. Embedded in a dynamic model of credit, such drivers of expectations formation can
amplify pro-cyclical booms and busts in the issuance of risky credit, credit spreads as well as
in investment spending.
15. Separately, on the empirical side, we have also seen much effort in the literature to
better measure expectations. The point of departure is that survey expectations are not
"noise". They are a useful tool insofar as they reflect what market participants and other
agents believe and act on. Our latest Macroeconomic Review featured an article by Professor
Bernard Yeung and Sumit Agarwal of the NUS Business School, reviewing the latest research
[7]
work on surveying and characterising consumer expectations . Attempts to make
inferences on the formation of expectations and validate any causal impact of expectations
on economic behaviour are oen thwarted by endogeneity or imprecise estimates. However,
large scale randomised control experiments in conjunction with carefully designed surveys
on consumers are now routinely used as they allow researchers to directly control the
formation of expectations and to reliably identify causal effects running from expectations to
behavioural responses.
16. The article summarises the results of a notable experiment done on Singapore
consumers, which show that consumers have biased inflation expectations. Specifically, the
study shows that consumers do not adjust for the effects of changes in quality on prices,
thereby overstating the true rate of inflation. This results in a systemic upward bias in the
public's inflation expectations if a society experiences widespread income growth, which at
the same time induces the upgrading of the quality of purchased goods. In Singapore, the
Department of Statistics has adopted hedonic regression techniques in the compilation of
the CPI for used cars for example, in order to achieve a more robust quality adjustment
[8]
between the obsolete and replacement models that may differ in technical specifications.
17. In April 2018, Professor Aurobindo Ghosh, in collaboration with researchers at the
Behavioural Insights Team in Singapore and the Economic Policy Group, MAS conducted two
randomised experiments with a view to improving the framing of inflation expectation
questions in the survey used to form the SInDEx measure. This work found that providing
respondents with current information on inflation and other key macroeconomic variables
helped them better contextualise and anchor their responses. These results have guided
changes introduced to questions in the survey, which have gone some way towards reducing
the commonly observed upwards bias in surveyed consumer inflation expectations.
Conclusion
18. To conclude, inflation dynamics and expectations are important underpinnings of the
macroeconomic dynamics confronting the region in the period ahead. The organisations
represented here are at the forefront of analysis into the various aspects of these
developments. I am sure there will be interesting insights and perspectives from this
Seminar.
[1]
See for example, Crust, E, Daly, M, and Hobijn, B (2020), "The Illusion of Wage Growth", Federal
Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Economic Letters, 2020-26.
[2]
International Monetary Fund (2021), "Chapter 1. Global Prospects and Policies", World Economic
Outlook: Managing Divergent Recoveries, April.
[3]
See for example: Shiller, R. J. (1981), "Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to be Justified by Subsequent
Changes in Dividends?", American Economic Review, Vol. 71(3), pp.421 - 436; Akerlof, G. A. (1970), "The
Market for 'Lemons': Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism", The Quarterly Journal of
Economics, Vol. 84(3), pp.488 - 500.
[4]
Akerlof, G. A. and Shiller, R. J. (2009), Animal Spirits, Princeton University Press.
[5]
Gennaioli, N. and Shleifer, A. (2018), A Crisis of Beliefs, Princeton University Press.
[6]
Representativeness entails a judgement error of overestimating the likelihood of representative
attributes which appear with higher relative frequency in a class. See reference in note 4.
[7]
Agarwal, S. and Yeung, B, (2021), "Inflation Expectations and Household Consumption",
Macroeconomic Review, Vol. XX(1), pp.61 - 65.
[8]
Department of Statistics (2020), "Rebasing of the Consumer Price Index for General Households",
Statistics Newsletter Singapore, Issue 1.
© 2021, Government of Singapore.