Exploration of Government Policies to Achieve the Inflationary Target

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Exploration of Government Policies to Achieve the Inflationary Target

The aim of this essay is to explain to the reader what is meant by the

term ‘inflation’ and to outline the policies used by the government to

achieve its inflationary target. To help me achieve my aim I am going

to use various resources throughout the essay, this includes slides

provided during lectures, materials received in tutorials and internet

sites with the relevant information for me to complete my aim.

Inflation is the increase in the costs to produce a product. When

these costs rise, the value of money falls, meaning that when there is

inflation our money buys us less. There are many different types of

inflation and examples of these are demand pull inflation and cost

push inflation.

The control over inflation has become one of the government’s main

objectives. There can be lots of different reasons for inflation such

as excess demand for goods and service or cost-push inflation, etc.

To help control this, different policies have been set to help the

government achieve the inflationary target. However it is not that

easy to predict inflation. Many different decisions are made by large

or small businesses every day that could affect inflation such as an

increase in selling price or a change in import or export of goods.

Also a change in inflation abroad can affect the UK if goods are being

imported from that country, often a higher payment will be needed to

pay for the import and this raises production costs for the UK.

Inflation measures the annual rate of change of the general price

level in the economy. One way of measuring inflation is RPI, retail

price index. This measures how the price of household goods has

changed over a certain period. Each item is given a ‘weight’ to

calculate the percentage of RPI. I have taken the table from the

lecture slides to give an example of goods RPI weights.

(1) RPI WEIGHTS

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