May well be. Giving a default negative like this can mean 'any result' which pretty much amounts to any random number from the lowest extent of an Integer to the highest extent of an Integer. XML like this should be not only avoided but stamped out when found. More proper to simply leave the line as <iInflation/>.
<X></X> and <x/> are EXACTLY the same thing, and will be parsed in exactly the same way. The issue here is the iInflation is not given an appropriate default value I suspect (in the DLL). However, it is true that null specification like that in the XML should be avoided where possible, just to reduce confusion (and [slightly] parse times)
Edit - hmm - the code does appear to set a default value of 0 (as it should), so I'm not sure why this is happening. I'll see what I can find later today.