1 High income growth and a sharp rise in the number of households laid the basis for a sharp, long-term rise in house prices. Self-reinforcing mechanisms were also at work, generating an atmosphere approaching euphoria. People hurried to buy dwellings in order to take advantage of the rise in value. It now appears that the housing market is cooling after an almost three-fold rise in prices in real terms in the course of the past 14 years. House price inflation has been accompanied by strong growth in household debt. Household debt in Norway is now about twice the level of disposable income, making the debt-income ratio higher than ever. At the same time, saving is declining and now seems to be negative. This means that in addition to fully financing their housing investments through mortgages, households are also raising loans to finance current consumption. As I mentioned earlier, the favourable developments in the Norwegian economy of the past few years are primarily due to supply-side changes. A flexible inflation target for monetary policy – as in Norway and a number of other countries – provides a sound basis for coping with the shocks to our economy that have occurred in recent years. The aim of preventing  1  See Elisabeth Fevang og Knut Røed (2006): ”Veien til uføretrygd i Norge” (The road to disability pensions in Norway), Report No. 10 2006, Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research. Norwegian only.
The "leader" – the social partners – can internalise the monetary policy response and take the "follower’s" – Norges Bank’s – response to their actions into account. This approach is most relevant when wage setting is centralised. A number of studies2 have shown that countries with a relatively high degree of centralisation and coordination, such as Norway, can achieve relatively low unemployment. When wage-setting is decentralised, monetary policy will instead influence wage growth via market mechanisms, by stabilising aggregate demand for goods, services and labour. Monetary policy that is flexibly oriented towards low and stable inflation will function well whether wages are set at the central, local or individual level. 2 In the initial period after the introduction of the inflation target in 2001, it appeared that the social partners had not yet internalised the response pattern ensuing from the monetary policy mandate. We are now well into a cyclical phase with very high capacity utilisation and low unemployment. In this situation, there may be a risk that wage growth will again accelerate. On the other hand, the experience gained by the social partners that large pay rises push up interest rates may have the effect of curbing pay increases. In local wage negotiations at enterprise level, competition, the supply of foreign labour and the possibility of outsourcing or relocating activities may dampen the impact. Low and stable inflation should not be taken for granted. Norway’s and other countries’ economic history shows that inflation and inflation expectations can become unhinged.