Lecture
PE_PP talk: The governance of inflation
- Donato di Carlo, Luca Cigna & Jens van ‘t Klooster
- Date
- Friday 21 March 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Wijnhaven
Turfmarkt 99
2511 DP The Hague - Room
- 2.17
Few economic governance issues have proven more salient than the recent return of inflation, sparked by supply chain bottlenecks during and after the COVID-19 pandemic and aggravated by Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine. The widespread cost-of-living crisis has fueled an anti-incumbent backlash across the advanced capitalist democracies, to the extent that some observers have attributed Donald Trump’s return to office on grocery price increases in key swing states. While reminiscent of the oil crises of the 1970s, the inflation crisis of the 2020s required fresh economic thinking and novel policy ideas. Yet, economic policy-makers have largely fallen back on orthodox monetary policy solutions. This panel brings together two ongoing research projects that show that competition authorities, fiscal policy-makers and social partners (unions and employers) have a key role to play in mitigating the causes and consequences of the cost-of-living crisis. Taken together, they suggest that the governance of inflation is too important to be left to independent central banks alone.