IT has become fashionable to portray deflation as some sort of disease to be avoided at all costs, an idea repeated in your Comment column (Echo, Jan 2).

The reality is that several periods of steadily falling prices in the 1800s and before have been periods of prosperity and economic expansion.

It is true, as you point out, that given falling prices there is a tendency to hold off purchases in the hope of lower prices in the future. But this is only a tendency.

Equally, given inflation, there is a tendency to “buy now”

before prices rise. But this doesn’t mean that every one empties their bank accounts and fills their houses with three years’ supply of baked beans, etc.

You rightly quote the recent Japanese experience with deflation. Deflation persists in Japan, not because deflation is some sort of incurable disease, but because the Japanese won’t do anything effective about it.

Japanese households tend to save large amounts before they really start spending. This means (as Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank, has pointed out) that the Japanese authorities literally need to print money and dish it out to the population at large.

Ralph Musgrave, Durham.