b)  Support for policies  Ultimately sound economics is sound politics as well. But the problem is that economic measures may take time to bear fruit. In other words reforms usually have immediate costs and the benefits are (sometimes) distant. Let me stress again that policymakers must educate the public at large to get their support. If this is not the case, it may be a serious obstacle to rapid transition. With the benefit of hindsight and from the perspective of a central banker I would say that in the past we lacked not so much sound economic decisions but good public relations for our policies. This is especially true in the case where the central bank initiated bankruptcy procedures or withdrew licences for 25 banks which was something unheard of in Croatia in the last fifty years. Let us not blame only people or politicians for their resistance to those measures. New economic policy is like a new 7  BIS Review 43/2000  product. It is the responsibility of the producer - the policymakers - to overcome the information assymetry and inform the consumers - the population and the politicians - of the benefits of this product (bankruptcies in the banking system) and sell it successfully. If central banks in transition economies want to be successful they should be much more “customer-oriented” and educate the public and politicians about the benefits of their main products: price stability and financial stability. Otherwise, they risk a weak demand for their services.
5 Figures 1 and 2 show a comparison of the accuracy of the forecasts in the period 1999-2008 for CPI inflation and GDP growth for a number of analysts. The red bars show the absolute mean error adjusted for differences in publication dates. The blue bars show the mean error with positive or negative sign. The shorter the blue bars, the smaller the systematic over- or underestimation has been – and the less bias the forecasts have had. If the bar is above the zero line the mean error has been positive and the forecasts have on average been too low, and vice versa. In the case of both inflation and GDP growth, the Riksbank's accuracy has been relatively good and its bias relatively small compared to other forecasters. Was monetary policy well-balanced ex ante? Given that it has been determined that the central bank's forecasts are normally satisfactory, the next step is to analyse, ex ante, the monetary policy deliberations the central bank has conducted on the basis of the forecasts. The first question to answer is whether the monetary policy conducted has been efficient. Given the information available at the time the decision was made, would it have been possible, by selecting a different interest rate path, to have stabilised inflation or the real economy better without stabilising the other less well? Would it even have been possible to achieve a better stabilisation of both?