{"id":549943,"date":"2026-07-29T18:11:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T18:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/549943\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T18:11:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T18:11:08","slug":"reserve-banks-dual-mandate-achievable-economist-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/549943\/","title":{"rendered":"Reserve Bank’s dual mandate ‘achievable’, economist says"},"content":{"rendered":"

An economist says the Reserve Bank could successfully bring back its dual mandate of low inflation and full employment.<\/p>\n

Countries around the world, including the United States and Australia, had implemented dual mandates, independent economist Cameron Bagrie said.<\/p>\n

“Sometimes, in certain situations, the two can cause a few frictions, but by and large, the two are achievable.”<\/p>\n

His comments come after New Zealand First leader Winston Peters signalled he could resurrect the dual mandate, which was scrapped by the coalition government<\/a> early in its current term.<\/p>\n

It also came as the unemployment rate stood at 5.3 percent, with forecasts suggesting it could nudge higher when Stats NZ released its data next week.<\/p>\n

Critics have argued that having an employment mandate sitting alongside inflation targeting could take the focus away from the latter.<\/p>\n

“First and foremost, any central bank, when it comes to targeting inflation or full employment, their main priority is going to be inflation,” Bagrie said.<\/p>\n

“Realistically, it wouldn’t make any material difference in regard to how the Reserve Bank would go about their everyday job.”<\/p>\n

Assuming New Zealand moved back to the settings that were in place under the previous Labour government, Bagrie said he did not think there would be too many problems.<\/p>\n

Parliament passed a bill to remove the Reserve Bank’s mandate to consider employment levels in monetary policy decisions in December 2023, shortly after the formation of the current National-led coalition.<\/p>\n

It was the first piece of legislation passed by the Government.<\/p>\n

Prior to the bill becoming law, Finance Minister Nicola Willis said it gave the Reserve Bank “absolute clarity about its role in our economy”.<\/p>\n

“It needs to focus on the principal objective of price stability,” she said.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week, Peters described the removal of the employment mandate as a “dead rat” his party had to accept at the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An economist says the Reserve Bank could successfully bring back its dual mandate of low inflation and full…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549944,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-549943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}