Optimal Monetary Policy Rule along the Targeted Energy Subsidy Plan: A Flexible Inflation Targeting Approach

The aim of this study is to design an optimal monetary policy rule for stabilization policy of output and inflation, while the government is removing subsidies on energy carriers in the economy of Iran. Thus, the impacts of energy prices reform and implementation of compensation policies are evaluated on major macroeconomic variables, particularly output and inflation. Then an optimal monetary rule is designed to control inflation rate within the framework of flexible inflation targeting. For this purpose, a loss function for the central bank, included inflation rate, output gap and liquidity growth deviation, is minimized using two constraints of the Phillips and aggregate demand curves (as a reduced form of a macro model), under carrying out the energy prices reform scheme. By using the derived optimal monetary rule in the macro model, the optimal liquidity growth was determined under different scenarios.
The results suggest that inflation can be controlled by implementing the optimal monetary policy. Meanwhile, the improvement of production conditions is possible just by productivity promotion through the supply-side policies.