Monetary policy
This year was the first in which the strategy of pursuing a direct inflationary target was implemented. The
Council’s decision to abandon the use of money supply growth as the official intermediate monetary policy target is
attributable to the fact that the correlation between the M2 monetary aggregate and inflation was becoming
increasingly less stable and predictable. The inflation target from December 1997 to December 1998 was 9.5 per
cent. The actual price increase this period was 8.6 per cent. On average from 1997 to 1998 the inflation rate was
11.8 per cent. 1999 – 2003 sees the fulfilment of annual monetary policy targets as successive stages in reaching the
central medium – term monetary policy objective of bringing inflation to belo w 4 per cent by the year 2003. The
monetary policy of the NBP was geared to pursuing the inflationary target by using the various instruments at the
disposal of the central bank, such as interest rates, exchanges rates - lowering the rate of monthly devaluation under
the crawling band mechanism and broadening the trading band around central parity - and also regulatory reserve
requirements and refinancing facilities. An additional consideration factored into the decisions of the Monetary