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When taken to examine disinflation monetary policies, the current workhorse DSGE model of business cycle fluctuations successfully accounts for the main stylized facts in terms of recessionary effects and sacrifice ratio. We complement the transitional analysis of the short-run costs with a rigorous welfare evaluation and show that, despite the long-lasting economic downturn, disinflation entails non-zero overall welfare gains.

In this paper we generalise the standard optimal monetary policy literature as in Galí (2003) to the case of positive trend inflation. We present a simple framework that provides straightforward analytical results directly comparable with the standard case. Optimal monetary policy is strongly influenced by trend inflation and becomes less effective in controlling inflation as trend inflation increases. Moreover: (i) under discretion, optimal monetary policy may not be implementable (i.e., indeterminacy arises) and the efficient policy frontier worsens; (ii) under commitment, the degree of interest rate smoothing increases with trend inflation and the gains from commitment are highly sensitive to the level of underlying inflation. An ECB-like stability oriented monetary policy (i.e., 2% target inflation rate in the medium term) determines a substantial percentage loss in welfare with respect to a zero inflation target policy.

We assess the role of national fiscal policies, as automatic stabilizers, within a monetary union. We use a two-country New Keynesian DGE model which incorporates non-Ricardian consumers (as in Galì et al. 2004) and a home bias in the composition of national consumption bundles. We find that fiscal policies stabilize the aggregate economy but, in some cases, generate conflicting views among national policymakers. Finally, model determinacy requires that national fiscal feedbacks on debt accumulation be designed with reference to the debt dynamics of the entire monetary union. This is in sharp contrast with the "Brussels consensus" based on the view that the ECB alone should stabilize the union-wide economy and national fiscal policies should react to idiosyncratic shocks and to national debt levels.