My overall reading is that the evidence of increased international integration is sufficiently compelling for policy-makers to take it seriously, since it may affect their policy models and decision-making frameworks. These issues are explored in the next section.
This dominance is reflected in the resources that central banks devote to data collection and modeling and in the increasing sophistication and detail of central bank forecasts.9 Indeed, a number of central banks with explicit inflation objectives publish regular forecasts and closely link monetary policy decisions to those forecasts.10 The Federal Reserve does not explicitly link policy actions to forecasts, but projections of how the economy is likely to perform under different policy plans are nevertheless central to the monetary policy process in the United States; that is, the Federal Reserve relies primarily on the forecast-based approach for making policy.