TOKYO (Reuters) -The Bank of Japan will hold a workshop next month that wraps up a year-long review looking at the benefits and drawbacks of the many unconventional monetary easing tools used during its 25-year history battling deflation.
The workshop, to be held on May 21, will gather central bank officials, academics and private economists to discuss economic and price trends, as well as monetary policy in the past 25 years, the central bank said on Friday.
Upon becoming BOJ Governor in April last year, Kazuo Ueda announced the review to scrutinise the effects and side-effects of the central bank’s radical stimulus measures over the past 25 years.
The BOJ has said the findings will not have direct implications on the bank’s near-term policy decisions.
But central bank officials have said the review will be used to identify which among the tools could be used in the future, and in what way, when the BOJ next needs to ramp up stimulus.
The BOJ ended eight years of negative interest rates and other remnants of its unorthodox policy last month, marking a historic shift away from its focus on reflating growth with decades of massive monetary stimulus.
Japan’s decades-long battle with deflation hung heavily over the central bank’s deliberations over exiting ultra-loose monetary policy, analysts say.
(Reporting by Kantaro Komiya and Leika Kihara; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Sharon Singleton)
