The choice of the target of 0-3.5% was to make sure that it would not be difficult to meet the target over the first few years. when the inflation targeting was introduced,NPL were still very high; there was a lot of excess liquidity in the banking system and production capacity utilization was rather low, so core inflation was less than 1% and remained very low until fairly recently when the sharp rise in oil prices started to have spill over impacts on other prices (see Table 3).