in sweden in recent years will recognise. according to this view, the central banks will find it difficult to steer inflation for a long time to come. as i mentioned in my introduction, taken to its conclusion, this means that it is pointless to set up targets for inflation, as this is mainly determined by factors outside monetary policy. as i also noted earlier, the yellen camp does not share this view but believes that inflation targets are meaningful, important and possible to attain. implications of the swedish experiences what view, then, should we take of the international debate in light of our experiences here in sweden? as i see it, our experiences overall are more in line with the yellen camp's view. one example is that it seems to be possible to reach the target with a sufficiently powerful expansionary policy. one reservation here, of course, is that we still cannot be certain that inflation will really remain around the target, even if this is what the riksbank expects. another reservation is that neither is it obvious what part the phillips curve has played in the rise of inflation in sweden so far. increased resource utilisation has certainly gone hand in hand with rising inflation, but we have also seen that wage increases have so far been surprisingly modest given the economic situation. in that sense, it is too early to say whether sweden's experiences suggest that the phillips curve is continuing to work like usual. but our experiences nevertheless suggest that central banks ’ inflation targets are fully possible to reach. and the recent, relatively rapid increases in service prices are, after all, a sign that some form of phillips curve is active ( see figure 5 ). there has been quite a lively international debate on the phillips curve recently – about its slope and even about its existence. 15 personally, i take a fairly agnostic view of it. i see it as a mostly qualitative relationship between resource utilisation and inflation that does not say much more than that high resource utilisation sooner or later tends to lead to prices and wages rising more rapidly and that low resource utilisation leads to them rising more slowly. the effect on inflation of a given level of resource utilisation can certainly vary over time, which is to say that the slope of the phillips curve is not necessarily always the same. the time dynamics may also vary, that is the time lag of the impact of resource utilisation on inflation is not always the same. in addition, inflation is, of course, affected

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