The difficult choice of an inflation target

Once the domain of number-crunching human calculators in statistics agencies, the issue of how to measure inflation has been thrust into the limelight by changes in modern central banking. Robert Gordon, a member of the Boskin Commission which investigated consumer prices in the United States in the mid-1990s, recalls the "enormous amount of journalistic attention" the commission's findings received. For Gordon, this "reflected the central role of consumer price index (CPI) measurement in almost