"I find it incomprehensible that a state agency can publish an economic forecast containing an outlook of four consecutive years of negative or nil employment growth and yet no-one has been called to account to explain such a comprehensive failure of economic policy," he said yesterday.
The Reserve Bank's June Monetary Policy Statement said the central bank expected there would be fewer jobs in New Zealand in March 2011 than there were in March 2007.
Berl estimated the cost of continuing the inflation-targeting would cost 95,000 jobs during the next three years, or the equivalent of about $7.4 billion of GDP.
However, he had not heard the collective political leadership of the country summoning its economic advisers to explain what was wrong - because there must be something wrong, Dr Nana said.
"Is it because the advisers and officials continue to be mesmerised by the worthiness of inflation-targeting at all costs? This might explain why we have not been clearly told that the price of low inflation in New Zealand is some workers losing their jobs with no prospect of any new ones over the coming years."
Dr Nana assured the Otago Daily Times he was not making any of that up.
On page 29 of the MPS, the Reserve Bank said: "The length of the downturn is in part required to keep medium-term inflation under control."
That was worse than the recession forecast by the Reserve Bank, he said.
Four years of economic redundancy was no blip to be blamed on unseasonal weather conditions or otherwise dismissed as beyond control.
It was four years of lost opportunities and lost potential, and such waste would have ongoing costs.
He had no doubt the economic-policy framework, underpinned by the sole legislative target of price stability, had not served the needs of the New Zealand economy, Dr Nana said.
The country continued to bathe in the glory heaped upon it by international financiers overwhelmed by the enviable inflation-fighting record.
But after 20 years of inflation-fighting, the payoff was even more years of economic decline.
The Reserve Bank's forecasts might be wrong but that was not the point, he said.
"My point is that the costs of pursuing low inflation are not even registering with officials, policymakers and advisers.
Nor, it would seem, are any of the political leadership, of any hue, prepared to tackle this issue.
They collectively have yet to acknowledge that there are costs to be paid for low inflation."
"Once acknowledged, they should . . . indicate the level of these costs that they believe to be acceptable in pursuing the inflation target," he said.
