Bernanke, Ben

What I have in mind is that the Bank of Japan would announce its intention to restore the price level (as measured by some standard index of prices, such as the consumer price index excluding fresh food) to the value it would have reached if, instead of the deflation of the past five years, a moderate inflation of, say, 1 percent per year had occurred.

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Reflation--that is, a period of inflation above the long-run preferred rate in order to restore the earlier price level--proved highly beneficial following the deflations of the 1930s in both Japan and the United States. Finance Minister Korekiyo Takahashi brilliantly rescued Japan from the Great Depression through reflationary policies in the early 1930s, while President Franklin D. Roosevelt's reflationary monetary and banking policies did the same for the United States in 1933 and subsequent years.

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Eggertsson and Woodford (2003) have advanced a second argument for a price-level target for Japan in an important recent paper on monetary policy at the zero bound. These authors point out (as have many others) that, when nominal interest rates are at or near zero, the central bank can lower the real rate of interest only by creating expectations of inflation on the part of the public. Eggertsson and Woodford argue that a publicly announced price-level target of the type just described is more conducive to raising near-term inflation expectations than is an inflation target.