U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that globalization has not had a significant impact on reducing inflation in the country and actually may have raised it, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

Nor has globalization weakened the Fed's control over interest rates, Bernanke said in remarks prepared for delivery Friday night to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research in California.

The report said that some economists argued that globalization puts downward pressure on U.S. inflation, making the Fed's job easier.

Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said Monday that the integration of many countries since the fall of the Soviet Union into the world economy has "brought world unit labor costs down, brought inflation down and interest rates down."

But he also said that as that impact fades, long-term rates could rise by one to two percentage points worldwide in the next three to five years, according to the report.

Bernanke, however, said increased trade with China has reduced U.S. inflation, now running at about 2 percent, by only about 0.1 of a percentage point.

And he noted that while these emerging economies have added to the global supply of manufactured goods, they are also adding to the demand for oil and other commodities.

"There seems to be little basis for concluding that globalization overall has significantly reduced inflation in the U.S. in recent years; indeed, the opposite may be true," he said.

The Fed's outlook for inflation is influenced by spare capacity in the U.S. economy, the report said. But some economists and Fed officials have argued that because of globalization, the degree of spare capacity in the global economy also needs to be considered.

While some research has found a link between global capacity and domestic inflation, Bernanke said Fed researchers have cast doubt on it.

Source: Xinhua