And if it were possible there would be no real reason to let the monetary policy decisions be made by a Board with six members. It would be enough to have a single wise decision-maker. In recent decades, however, the trend has been in the opposite direction. All over the world, it has become more and more common to let monetary policy decisions be made by a group of individuals – a committee or board – rather than by a central bank governor alone. Probably the most important explanation for this is that many central banks have become more independent in this period. This has made it seem more natural to delegate the right to make decisions to a group of people rather than to one individual. This development has meant that research on monetary policy decision-making in groups has accelerated. 1 One result that has emerged is that groups tend to make better decisions than individuals. 2 This may be because the members of the group have different backgrounds, knowledge and experience that they can bring to the monetary policy discussion. These differences mark the decisions that the group makes in different ways so that these decisions tend to be better than the decisions that an individual would have made alone – the whole becomes greater than the parts. This applies irrespective of how the decision is made – by voting, as at the Riksbank, or in some other way.
In our latest assessment this was based on the belief that inflation was somewhat higher than now proves to be the case. But monetary policy does not have such a degree of precision that it can control inflation to a tenth of a degree. And, moreover, inflation in July was high and far above the inflation target even after the downward revision of the figure. In the discussion ahead of the interest rate decision, I and other members of the Executive Board highlighted the weak labour market indicators which uniformly pointed to a weaker development of employment, which is also in line with the Riksbank's forecast. After the decision, the Labour Force Survey for August has been presented. This shows that employment increased by a moderate 0.5 per cent on a 12-month basis, which is marginally lower than the Riksbank's forecast. At our September meeting, we had access to the initial version of the National Accounts for the second quarter. These showed that GDP did not increase at all compared to the previous quarter and increased by only 0.7 per cent on a calendar-adjusted12-month basis. Now that the revised version of the National Accounts has been published, we can see that growth in the first two quarters has been marginally adjusted downwards in both cases. This means that growth in the first quarter was 2 per cent on a 12-month basis and with calendar effects taken into account. The corresponding figure for the second quarter was 0.6 per cent.