Our cooperative journey to the SDDS Plus began in 2013, when, after the achieved national consensus on the usefulness of the accession to this standard, we officially informed the IMF of the efforts that we will make in the medium-term period to meet the membership criteria. Then, in the next years, we worked on the production, promotion and publication of the required data.
In addition, the current repo rate of 3.75 per cent is comparatively low, not least when one considers that inflation is around 3 per cent. The next question is how much importance should be accorded to each of the various factors and which side of the balance carries most weight. As regards the excessively high inflation at present, we have tried to analyse whether there are grounds for supposing that it stems from the Swedish economy having been more “overheated” during the recent upswing than we counted on earlier. The preliminary conclusion I believe can be drawn is that the explanation does not lie there. Most things suggest that inflation ought to fall back next spring as the transitory factors that pushed prices up drop out of the change figures. An alternative approach to whether the high inflation is temporary or more permanent involves looking at the development of by far the most important component of costs, namely wages. In that wage agreements have been completed, it is possible to arrive at a comparatively firm picture of how wages are developing, at least during this year and next. With reasonable assumptions about productivity, most things suggest that unit labour costs should be in line with the inflation target. This presupposes that the registered increase in inflation expectations, above all among labour market organisations, does not show up in wage increases; if that were to happen it would be very unfortunate and face monetary policy with new challenges.