BIS Review 18/2003  5  Graph 3  To the extent we can extract information from business surveys, they suggest that most businesses expect a low single-digit inflation rate to prevail for the economy in general.
Perhaps more importantly, few businesses appear to believe they have 'pricing power', and individual price changes against a low inflation backdrop are much more transparent than was the case under high inflation. Witness, for example, the degree of scrutiny of price rises in the period after the introduction of the GST, or the attention routinely given to changes in petrol prices.