The contribution that inflation targeting makes to macroeconomic stability is difficult to discern for a simple reason: it is impossible to know what would happen if a country’s central bank pursued the opposite course. Unable to compare outcomes directly, researchers have employed a variety of strategies to identify the impact of inflation targeting, and have typically found it to be substantial (though the effect becomes small or even zero when countries’ starting points are taken into account).
通胀目标对宏观经济稳定的作用很难确定，原因很简单：你不可能知道如果央行追求相反的目标国家会怎么样。无法直接比较结果，研究者只好用各种策略来识别通胀目标的影响，通常的发现是影响很大（尽管在考虑国家的起点的情况下，其影响会变小甚至降为零）。