Twenty-five years from now, I am confident that one of my successors will be able to look back and explain in his or her Mais Lecture the great improvements that took place between 2005 and 2030. But I like to think that the inflation target framework has the ability to serve us well over that period. Thirty years ago the theory of monetary policy was ahead of its practice, at least in the United Kingdom. Now I hope that the practice has given the theorists something to think about. Table 1: Inflation targeting countries Country New Zealand Chile Canada Israel U.K. Sweden Finland Australia Spain Czech Republic Korea Poland Mexico Brazil Colombia South Africa Thailand Iceland Norway Hungary Peru Philippines  Adoption of Inflation Targeting Dec. 1989 Jan. 1991 Feb. 1991 Jan. 1992 Oct. 1992 Jan. 1993 Feb. 1993 Mar. 1993 Jan. 1995 Apr. 1998 Apr. 1998 Oct. 1998 Jan. 1999 Jun. 1999 Sep. 1999 Feb. 2000 May 2000 Mar. 2001 Mar. 2001 July 2001 Jan. 2002 Jan. 2002  Source: Truman, Edwin (2003), Inflation Targeting in the World Economy, Institute for International Economics, Washington DC. The table not only includes current inflation targeting countries, but also Spain and Finland, which have since joined EMU.
There will inevitably be elements of tough love in such a process, and some disappointed ambitions, but I am confident that out of it will come a robust form of innovation. I hope also that laying out the principles of public interest and how they should be put into practice in the context of new innovation will help to deal with another difficult and perennial challenge of financial regulation. It is in the nature of innovation – and a good thing – that while some ideas succeed, many fall by the wayside. How many people remember Visi On, TopView and GEM? I have to admit I did not until I did some research for today. In the mid-1980s, they were rivals to Windows for the personal computer software market. More precisely, they were briefly rivals, but the rest as they say is history, as were these three rivals. In our world of finance, things can be more complicated, because dealing with failures itself raises public policy issues. There are quite often suggestions that central banks and financial regulators are anti-innovation and lukewarm on competition, because the results will at times be messy as the winners emerge and the losers fall by the wayside. We are not anti-innovation or anti-competition, but we are trying to manage our sphere of influence in order to achieve our public policy objectives, as required by Parliament and serve the public interest continuously. With that in mind, let me apply the framework to the world of payments and digital currency.