BIS central bankers’ speeches  Orphanides.11 Among other observations, he shows that the estimates of the GDP gap for the United States for a certain year, made by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have changed radically between the various dates of calculation, and draws the conclusion that GDP growth should be focused on as the basis for monetary policy, rather than the GDP gap. Figure 10 presents estimates of the GDP gap in real time and in accordance with the most recent calculation from September 2011. The estimates in real time show what we believed the current GDP gap to be at the various previous forecasting occasions. The figure indicates that resource utilisation was higher in the years preceding the crisis than we believed at the time. However, there are also problems with estimating resource utilisation in retrospect, which mean that such calculations may perhaps overestimate how high resource utilisation was before the crisis. I will come back to this. Despite these difficulties, my assessment is that the Riksbank’s calculations of the GDP gap largely give a reasonable view of current resource utilisation. The decisive factor for this assessment is that the GDP gap currently corresponds with other ways of measuring resource utilisation that are based on other economic statistics. These other measures also show that resource utilisation is largely normal. I will review a number of such measures at a later point.
Employment rate Percentage of population aged 16–64 85  85  80  80  75  75  Employment rate  70  70  Mean, 2000-2008  65  65  60  60 80  82  84  86  88  90  92  94  96  98  00  02  04  06  08  10  12  Source: Statistics Sweden  14  BIS central bankers’ speeches  13. RU indicator and GDP gap Standard deviation and percentage 6  6  GDP gap (PF) RU indicator  4  4  2  2  0  0  -2  -2  -4  -4  -6  -6  -8  -8 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14  Note. The RU indicator has been normalised so that the mean value is 0 and the standard deviation is 1. The reference period is 1996–2008. GDP gap according to production function (PF) approach. Sources: Statistics Sweden and the Riksbank  14. Actual and long-term unemployment Per cent of labour force aged 16–64 12  12  10  10  8  8  6  6  4  4  Unemployment Unemployment, forecast  2  2  Mean, 2000-2008 Long-term unemployment  0  0 80  85  90  95  00  05  10  15  20  Note.