More effective than we thought: Central bank independence and inflation in developing countries

This study examines the effect of legal central bank independence on inflation in developing countries. In spite of the policy consensus suggesting that central bank independence is an effective tool to control inflation, the evidence is still limited, particularly for developing countries. Using a novel dataset, we analyze the effect of central bank independence on inflation for a sample of 118 developing countries between 1980 and 2013. We find that higher central bank independence is associated with lower inflation rates. This effect on inflation is stronger the more democratic a country is, but it is also present in non-democratic countries. Our results are robust to different specifications and methodologies. Furthermore, we find that all dimensions included in the measurement of central bank independence (objectives, personnel, policy, and financial independence) contribute to curb inflation. Our results shed light on which types of reforms may be more effective at fighting inflation in developing countries.     

Does inflation targeting make a difference in developing countries?

We evaluate the treatment effect of inflation targeting in thirteen developing countries that have adopted this policy by the end of 2004. Using a variety of propensity score matching methods, we show that, on average, inflation targeting has large and significant effects on lowering both inflation and inflation variability in these thirteen countries. However, the effectiveness of inflation targeting on lowering inflation is found to be quite heterogeneous. The performance of a given inflation targeting regime can be affected by country characteristics such as government's fiscal position, central bank's desire to limit the movements of exchange rate, its willingness to meet the preconditions of policy adoption, and the time length since the policy adoption.     

Is inflation targeting a good remedy to control inflation?

Since the 1990s inflation targeting (IT) has been adopted by several central banks as a strategy for monetary policy. It is expected that the adoption of this monetary regime can reduce inflation and inflation volatility. This article is concerned with these issues and makes use of the Propensity Score Matching methodology on a sample of 180 countries for the period from 1990 to 2007. For analysis, the sample is split into two sets of countries (advanced and developing). The findings suggest that the adoption of IT is an ideal monetary regime for developing economies and, in addition to reducing inflation volatility, can drive inflation down to internationally acceptable levels. Regarding advanced economies, the adoption of IT does not appear to represent an advantageous strategy. In brief, the empirical results indicate that the adoption of IT is useful for countries that must enhance their credibility for the management of monetary policy.     

When does inflation hurt economic growth? Different nonlinearities for different economies

The effects of inflation on growth are shown to change substantially as the inflation rate rises. Moreover, the nonlinearities are quite different for industrial economies than for developing countries. Whereas it is often assumed that inflation does not significantly hurt growth in developing countries until the 20–40% range, we find that the threshold falls within single digits. Marginal growth costs for developing countries then decline significantly above 50% inflation. Failure to account for nonlinearity biases downward the estimated effects of inflation on growth. Mixing industrial and developing economies together also produces unreliable results.     

美国宽松的货币政策制造了世界性高通胀吗——基于次贷危机后不同经济体通货膨胀差异的分析

为了避免次贷危机所造成的不利影响,美国自2007年底开始大幅下调利率,并从2009年以来采取了量化宽松的货币政策,大量增加流动性。与此同时,2008年以来,世界各国尤其是新兴市场和发展中经济体发生了严重的通货膨胀。现存文献大多将此归因于美国宽松的货币政策,其实并不完全如此。虽然美国次贷危机以来的宽松货币政策确实提高了2008年以来的通货膨胀率,却不能解释新兴市场和发展中经济体的通货膨胀普遍高于发达经济体的事实。因此,美国宽松的货币政策只是扩大了原有的通货膨胀,而高通胀的根本原因仍然在于各国国内的高货币供给。     

Taylor principle and inflation stability in emerging market countries

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the validity of the Taylor principle for inflation control in 12 developing countries that use inflation targeting regimes: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, Poland, South Africa, Thailand and Turkey. The test is based on a state-space model to determine when each country has followed the principle; then a threshold unit root test is used to verify if the stationarity of the deviation of the expected inflation from its target depends on compliance with the Taylor principle. The results show that such compliance leads to the stationarity of the deviation of the expected inflation from its target in all cases. Furthermore, in most cases, non-compliance with the Taylor principle leads to nonstationary deviation of the expected inflation.     

Central bank inability and Taylor rule in developing countries

This paper seeks to adjust Taylor rule to mimic an environment that has central bank inability (losses). Moreover, the current paper is aiming at investigating the effect of the new features of Taylor rule within a context of a New-Keynesian model on a developing economy. The current paper concludes that we can utilize Taylor rule within a New-Keynesian model to introduce the influence of the central bank inability on the economy. Central bank inability decreases both expected future real interest rate and expected future real output. On the contrary, it increases expected future nominal interest rate and expected future inflation rate. Moreover, we prove that the effect of central bank inability has larger effect on the expected inflation rate more than the influence of targeted inflation rate.     

The process of technical change in UK manufacturing

This paper tests the validity of the Fisher hypothesis, which establishes a positive relation between interest rates and expected inflation, for the G7 countries and 45 developing economies. For this purpose, we estimate a version of the GARCH specification of the hypothesis for all countries included in the sample. We also test the augmented Fisher relation by including the inflation uncertainty in the equation. The simple Fisher relation holds in all G7 countries but in only 23 developing countries. There is a positive and statistically significant relationship between interest rates and inflation uncertainty for six of the G7 and 18 of the developing countries and this relationship is negative for seven developing countries.     

Non-linearity in the inflation–growth relationship in developing economies: Evidence from a semiparametric panel model

Using data on developing economies, we estimate a flexible semiparametric panel data model that incorporates potentially nonlinear effects of inflation on economic growth. We find that inflation is associated with significantly lower growth only after it reaches about 12 percent, which is notably lower than the comparable estimate obtained from a threshold model. Our results also suggest that models with restrictive functional form assumptions tend to underestimate marginal effects of inflation on economic growth. We also document significant variation in the effect of inflation on growth across countries and over time.     

Inflation dynamics in a small emerging market

This study investigates the determinants of inflation in the Dominican Republic during 1991 to 2002, a period characterized by remarkable macroeconomic stability and growth. By developing a parsimonious and empirically stable error correction model using quarterly observations, the study finds that inflation is explained by changes in monetary aggregates, real output, foreign inflation and the exchange rate. Long-run relationships in the money and traded goods markets are found to exist, but only the disequilibrium from the money market exerts a significant impact on inflation.     

Inflation and economic growth: a multi-country empirical analysis

The world eocnomy is currently adjusting to a low inflation regime which has implicastions for the cross-country distribution of world growth opportunities. In contrast to previous related work which assumes unidirectional causality, this paper uses the Granger methodology to examine both the direction and pattern of causality between inflation and economic growth in 70 countries using annual data over the period 1960–89. Among the conclusions are that first, the relationship between inflation and growth is non-uniform across countries: 40% of countries studied reveal no causality, one-third exhibit unidirectional causality and about one-fifth of countries show bidirectional causality, second, a vast majority of countries which show either uni- or bi-directional causality beong to the industrial group, and third, the low world inflation regime will on balance redistribute real growth opportunities benefit away from the developing countries towards the industrialized countries.     

Are Tariffs Inflationary?

Economists universally regard tariffs to be inflationary and free trade to be deflationary, a view that this paper challenges. It is argued that while rotectionism has generally created inflation in developing economies, the experience of the United States was totally different. Tariffs in the US were never associated with rising prices, and trade liberalization with declining prices. High tariffs were always followed by sharp drops in the cost of living. A theoretical model is developed to explain the deflationary effects of tariffs in the United States. Thus tariffs produce inflation only in nonmarket or ualistic developing economies, but not in advanced economies.     

金融市场对我国通货膨胀与收入不平等关系的调节作用分析——基于财富门槛视角

笔者通过构建数理模型,从金融市场财富门槛的角度对我国通货膨胀与收入不平等的关系进行了理论分析。结果发现,一方面,在我国金融市场不发达的现实背景下,形成了规避通货膨胀的财富门槛,财富门槛降低了低收入群体规避通货膨胀的效果,扩大了收入差距;另一方面,通货膨胀又在事实上提高了金融市场的财富门槛,进一步加剧了收入不平等状态。利用我国1978年～2009年时间序列数据,进行Johansen协整检验与Granger因果检验,结果验证了金融市场对我国通货膨胀与收入不平等关系的正向影响作用。     

Inflation targeting in emerging economies: Panel evidence

This paper shows there is no evidence that the inflation targeting regime (IT) improves economic performance as measured by the behavior of inflation and output growth in developing countries. The control of common time effects results in less negative and less significant IT impacts on inflation, inflation volatility and output growth volatility than previously found in the literature. Additionally, our analysis shows robust evidence of lower output growth during IT adoption. On balance, although lower long-run mean inflation signals that the central banks of emerging economies with inflation targeting are more inflation-averse, the costs of disinflation have not been lower than under other monetary regimes.     

Political instability,political freedom and inflation

Using a dynamic panel data approach, we estimate the impact of the political and institutional factors on inflation. Estimation results show that a lower degree of political instability generates lower inflation only for developed and low-inflation countries. However, when political freedom is taken into account, political instability appears to be influential on inflation also for developing countries and turns out to be significant only for high-inflation countries. Such findings emphasize the inflation-reducing effects of political stability depending on democratic political structure.     

The inflationary experiences of six developing countries in Asia: an investigation of underlying determinants

This paper investigates major deteminats of the inflation rate in six Asian developing countries. The sample includes low and moderate-high inflation cases. For the investigation a monetarist model of the inflation rate adjusted to account for important external factors is used. The results show that the growth of the money stock was not a primary source of inflation in all countries. However, various factors that influence the public's willingness to hold money are behind inflationary pressures across countries. Among these, some are external factors stemming from changes in foreign interst rates and import prices. Overall, the evidence suggests that the success of domestic policy in fighting inflation is highly dependent on the unique inflationary experience of each country.     

Do currency undervaluations affect the impact of inflation on growth?

In this paper, we investigate how the level of currency undervaluations affects the effect of inflation on growth in a sample of 62 countries over the 1980–2015 period. While previous studies find a positive effect of an undervalued currency, we show that higher currency undervaluations reinforce the contractionary effect of inflation on growth. As an undervalued currency is associated with supplementary inflation pressures arising from a cost-push inflation phenomenon and economy overheating, growth is thus penalized. This result is shown to be robust to the exclusion of currency crises episodes from our sample, and dependent of the development level of countries. Specifically, it holds in the case of emerging countries, but not for developing economies. Consequently, policies based on undervaluations should not be encouraged for emerging economies as they tend to reinforce the contractionary effect of inflation on growth.     

Reexamining the relationship between inflation and growth: Do institutions matter in developing countries?

Using a large panel of countries during the period 1950–2009, we estimate the inflation thresholds above which its association with economic growth is expected to be negative, taking into account differences in institutions across countries. First, in line with previous literature, we find that the estimated threshold is substantially higher for developing countries compared to that of developed countries. However, we further show that the inflation threshold in developing economies falls when we consider reduced groups that exceed certain levels of institutional quality. We also find that the cost of inflation increases with the quality of institutions.     

通货膨胀目标制实践经验的国际考察

作为一种新型的货币政策制度框架,标准型通货膨胀目标制在全球的中央银行中已经获得了一定的认同.然而迄今为止,我们还缺乏一个对目前大量的通货膨胀目标制实践经验进行简洁而全面的概括,借以对货币政策的实践和通货膨胀目标钉住者的前景展望提供相应指南.而这种指南之所以必要,是因为队伍不断庞大的发展中国家和新兴市场经济体正在考虑是否采纳通货膨胀目标制.借鉴标准型通货膨胀目标制国家在控制通货膨胀过程中所积累的经验,探讨通货膨胀目标制国家面临的主要问题、发展趋势、政策实践,其目的是为了从国家的角度来思考是否应该采纳通货膨胀目标制;而对于已经实施通货膨胀目标制的国家,则要考虑如何健全这一制度框架.     

Inflation Effects on Finance-Growth Link: A Panel Smooth Threshold Approach

This paper proposes an original framework to examine whether the strength of the relationship between financial development and economic growth, widely documented in the recent empirical literature, varies with the inflation rate. Using a Panel Smooth Threshold Regression for 71 developed and developing countries over the period 1960–2004, we find a non-linear link between financial development and economic growth: three equilibriums are identified with inflation rate. Then, there is an inflation threshold, for which finance ceases to increase economic growth. Our results suggest that for an inflation rate higher than 20%, economic growth is not, or is negatively, affected by financial development, whereas the impact of finance on growth is positive and significant for an inflation level below 10%.