Many Targets, Many Instruments: Where Do We Stand?
Thank you to the International Monetary Fund for allowing me to take part in what I expect will be a very lively discussion. 1  Only five or six years ago, there wouldn ’ t have been a panel on the “ many instruments ” and “ many targets ” of monetary policy. Before the financial crisis, the focus was on one policy instrument: the short-term policy interest rate. Although central banks did not uniformly rely on a single policy target, many adopted an “ inflation targeting ” framework that, as the name implies, gives a certain preeminence to that one objective. Of course, the Federal Reserve has long been a bit of an outlier in this regard, with its explicit dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment. Still, the discussion might not have gone much beyond “ one instrument and two targets ” if not for the financial crisis and its aftermath, which have presented central banks with great challenges and transformed how we look at this topic. Let me start with a few general observations to get the ball rolling. In terms of the targets, or, more generally, the objectives of policy, I see continuity in the abiding importance of a framework of flexible inflation targeting. By one authoritative account, about twenty-seven countries now operate full-fledged inflation-targeting regimes. 2 The United States is not on this list, but the Federal Reserve has embraced most of the key features of flexible inflation targeting: a commitment to promote low and stable inflation over a longer-term horizon, a predictable monetary policy, and clear and transparent communication. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) struggled for years to formulate an inflation goal that would not seem to give preference to price stability over maximum employment. In January 2012, the committee adopted a “ Statement on Many Targets, Many Instruments: Where Do We Stand?
State of the art of inflation targeting
Inflation targeting has been adopted by an increasing number of central banks as their monetary policy framework. At the start of 2010, some twenty seven central banks were considered fully fledged inflation targeters, and many others are in the process of establishing a full inflation-targeting framework. In this Handbook we publish details of the key features of the inflation-targeting frameworks in each of the 27 inflation targeting central banks around the world. These data enable us to analyse the state of the art of inflation targeting: the legal and institutional arrangements; the design of the inflation target; the decision-making body and process of decision-making; the models and forecasts used by central banks; the accountability mechanisms in place, and the communication and publication strategies. This handbook was written in June 2009 and updated in 2012.
Benchmark database for fine-grained image classification of benthic macroinvertebrates
Abstract Managing the water quality of freshwaters is a crucial task worldwide. One of the most used methods to biomonitor water quality is to sample benthic macroinvertebrate communities, in particular to examine the presence and proportion of certain species. This paper presents a benchmark database for automatic visual classification methods to evaluate their ability for distinguishing visually similar categories of aquatic macroinvertebrate taxa. We make publicly available a new database, containing 64 types of freshwater macroinvertebrates, ranging in number of images per category from 7 to 577. The database is divided into three datasets, varying in number of categories (64, 29, and 9 categories). Furthermore, in order to accomplish a baseline evaluation performance, we present the classification results of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that are widely used for deep learning tasks in large databases. Besides CNNs, we experimented with several other well-known classification methods using deep features extracted from the data.