Inflation persistence in African countries: Does inflation targeting matter?

This study investigates inflation persistence in annual CPI inflation collected between 1994 and 2014 for 46 African countries. We group these countries into panels according to whether they are inflation targeters or not and conduct estimations for pre and post inflation targeting periods. Interestingly enough, we find that inflation persistence was much higher for inflation targeters in periods before adopting their inflation targeting regimes and inflation persistence dropped by 40 percent for these countries after adopting the policy frameworks. For non-inflation targeters inflation persistence has increased by almost 290 percent between the two time periods