4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  It would appear that in many advanced economies the inflation dynamics are a little different from those in the past. In earlier decades, it was very rare for central banks to worry that inflation and inflation expectations were too low. Yet today, we hear this concern quite often, and the ‘unconventional’ has almost become conventional.
One factor that has contributed to the low inflation outcomes is the fall in oil prices. But a more fundamental influence has been the low wage increases in most advanced economies. In a number of these economies, including the United States, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom, the low wage increases have coexisted with fairly strong employment growth and not-so-strong output growth.