Emerging-market central-bank experiments risk reigniting inflation

began to rise unusually quickly two years ago, one group was fastest to react: emerging-market central bankers. They realised inflation had arrived for the long haul well before their peers in rich countries, and kept raising interest rates as prices soared. In policymaking environments as difficult as Brazil and Russia officials have resisted pressure from politicians to cut rates. This follows two decades in which emerging-market central bankers pulled off the impressive feat of bringing down inflation in places where it had seemed intractable. The whole period has been a triumph not just for the officials involved, but for the economists who insisted on the need for independent central banks in emerging economies—and for them to focus on keeping prices stable, just like policymakers in rich countries.Yet even as the inflation monster remains untamed, emerging-market central banks are engaging in experiments that put this progress at risk. Some of the new measures are in response to changes beyond their control, such as Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Others are attempts to overcome painfully familiar problems, like currency depreciation. All threaten to undermine recent advances, which are ultimately based on central-bank credibility. Over the past few decades, the better policymakers managed to anchor inflation, the more their targets were believed and the more prices were constrained. In 1995 median inflation in emerging economies was 10%; by 2017 it had fallen to 3%. This was the pinnacle of a slow, miraculous transformation.