At the same time, low inflation has encouraged Canadian businesses to operate more efficiently and to focus on cost control and productivity improvements. That is quite a change from our experience in the 1970s and 1980s. That experience amply demonstrated what a terrible price the economy and the people pay for high, unstable, and unpredictable inflation.
I am thinking here of the increased uncertainty about the future, the distortion of vital signals and information that people rely on to make important decisions, the ups and downs in  BIS Review 15/2001  1  output and employment, and the waste of valuable economic resources as they are diverted from productive investments to speculative activities.