This article reviews the Thailand monetary policy rule and its performance under the adoption of inflation targeting regime since 2000. The study estimates the policy reaction function to see if the inflation targeting has been linked with an inflation-responsive monetary policy rule, and investigates whether the monetary policy rule would actually have its transmission effect on inflation, through tracing the impulse responses of inflation rate to monetary policy shocks. The main findings are as follows. The estimation outcomes of the policy reaction function show that the Thailand monetary policy rule is characterized as an inflation-and exchange-rate-responsive rule with forward-looking manner, which is countercyclical against inflation in the long run, but is accompanied with slow adjustment toward a target policy rate. The impulse response analyses imply that the Thailand monetary policy has only a marginal transmission effect on inflation probably due to the slow adjustment of policy rate.

This paper aims to reassess the performances of inflation targeting adopted by emerging ASEAN countries, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, by examining their monetary policy rules, both through generalized-method-of-moments (GMM) estimations of policy reaction functions and through Bayesian estimations of the New Keynesian dynamic-stochastic-general-equilibrium (DSGE) model. The main findings are summarized as follows. First, the GMM estimations identified inflation-responsive rules fulfilling the Taylor principle, with a forward-looking manner in Indonesia and Thailand and with a contemporaneous way in the Philippines. Second, the Bayesian estimations of the New Keynesian DSGE could reassure the GMM estimation results, as the former estimations produced consistent outcomes with the latter ones on the policy rate reactions to inflation with the Taylor principle.

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This paper examines the monetary policy rules for five emerging ASEAN economies—Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand as the adopters of inflation targeting (IT) and Malaysia and Vietnam as the non-IT adopters. For the methodology, this study applies a generalized method of moments that provides a consistent and efficient estimator for the estimation that contains endogenously determined variables. The questions are whether the rules of the IT adopters have fulfilled the Taylor principle and what has been the difference in the rules between the IT adopters and the non-IT adopters. The main findings are as follows: Regarding the IT adopters, their rules are characterized by inflation-responsive rules fulfilling the Taylor principle. As for the non-IT adopters, Malaysia follows solely an output-gap responsive rule, and Vietnam exhibits the mixed rules. The policy implications are that for the IT adopters there might be room to make their policy-rate responses more elastic to inflation, and that for the non-IT adopters, there would be a need to adopt an explicit IT framework.