Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe: money demand,seigniorage and aid shocks

Zimbabwe experienced record hyperinflation of 80 billion per cent per month in 2008. This article uses new data from Zimbabwe to investigate money demand under hyperinflation using an autoregressive distributed-lag model for the period 1980–2008. The results produce plausible convergence rates and long-run elasticities, indicating that real-money balances are cointegrated with the inflation rate and signifying an equilibrium relationship between the two series. Evidence is also presented suggesting prices were driven by increases in the money supply rather than by changes in price setting behaviour. The article uses the estimated elasticity on the inflation variable to calculate the maximum level of seigniorage revenue that could be raised in the economy. Actual seigniorage levels increased dramatically after 2000, with inflation eventually exceeding the rate required to maximize this revenue stream. This is discussed in relation to international financing constraints and the collapse of the domestic tax base.     

The effect of inflation on growth

The paper examines the effect of inflation on growth in transition countries. It presents panel data evidence for 13 transition countries over the 1990–2003 period; it uses a fixed effects panel approach to account for possible bias from correlations among the unobserved effects and the observed country heterogeneity. The results find a strong, robust, negative effect on growth of inflation or its standard deviation, and one that appears to decline in magnitude as the inflation rate increases, as seen for OECD countries. And the results include a role for a normalized money demand in affecting growth, as well as for a convergence variable, a trade variable and a government share variable. Robustness of the baseline single‐equation model is examined by expanding this into a three‐equation simultaneous system of output growth, inflation and money demand that allows for possible simultaneity bias in the baseline model.     

Granger causality of the inflation–growth mirror in accession countries*

The paper presents a model in which the exogenous money supply causes changes in the inflation rate and the output growth rate. While inflation and growth rate changes occur simultaneously, the inflation acts as a tax on the return to human capital and in this sense induces the growth rate decrease. Shifts in the model's credit sector productivity cause shifts in the income velocity of money that can break the otherwise stable relationship between money, inflation, and output growth. Applied to two accession countries, Hungary and Poland, a VAR system is estimated for each that incorporates endogenously determined multiple structural breaks. Results indicate Granger causality positively from money to inflation and negatively from inflation to growth for both Hungary and Poland, as suggested by the model, although there is some feedback to money for Poland. Three structural breaks are found for each country that are linked to changes in velocity trends, and to the breaks found in the other country.     

DOES MONEY MATTER FOR INFLATION IN THE EURO AREA?

We analyze the relationship between M3 growth and inflation within an error correction framework including also the output gap, the 3‐mo EURIBOR, and the 10‐yr government bond yield. We find robust cointegration between money growth and inflation. Shocks in M3 growth account for up to 30% of the inflation forecast error variance, while the effects of output gap and interest rate shocks are mainly transitory. Significantly different dynamics are found during periods at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties when interest rate and inflation rate levels were high and real money growth decreasing. (JEL C32, E31, E41)     

Fiscal and Monetary Policies in a Transactions‐Based Endogenous Growth Model with Imperfect Competition

This paper's model is capable of explaining the empirical evidence on the mixed growth‐rate effects of fiscal and monetary policies and a nonlinear inflation–growth relation. When monopoly power in the product market is strong/weak, an increase in the money growth rate or the income tax rate promotes/reduces the output growth rate through lowering/raising the equilibrium gross markup and increasing/reducing the net rate of return on capital. The fact that money can generate a positive growth rate effect allows for the appearance of a nonlinear inflation–growth relation. Such a nonlinear relation cannot be caused by changes in the income tax rate.     

Financial market imperfections and monetary policy strategy

In a model with imperfect money, credit and reserve markets, we examine if an inflation-targeting central bank applying the funds rate operating procedure to indirectly control market interest rates also needs a monetary aggregate as policy instrument. We show that if private agents use information extracted from money and financial markets to form inflation expectations and if interest rate pass-through is incomplete, the central bank can use a narrow monetary aggregate and the discount interest rate as independent and complementary policy instruments to reinforce the credibility of its announcements and the role of inflation target as a nominal anchor for inflation expectations. This study shows how a monetary policy strategy combining inflation targeting and monetary targeting can be conceived to guarantee macroeconomic stability and the credibility of monetary policy. Friedman's k-percent money growth rule, which can generate dynamic instability, and two alternative stabilizing feedback monetary targeting rules are examined.     

我国M1货币政策中介目标的 一个合理选择

本文定义了货币M1的一个新增长率,以其值作为与实际经济增长率相适应的中介目标值;定义了货币M1的一个超额增长率,以其负值作为与通货膨胀率相适应的中介目标值;在此基础上,重新确定M1货币增长率的值作为中介目标值。实证表明在中国这样确定的货币政策中介目标值与经济增长和通货膨胀最终目标一致。     

Rational expectations and M2 demand

This essay expands on existing studies of M2 money demand. It differs in that it applies a rational expectations approach to an adaptive expectation model. Unlike the adaptive expectations models, the author includes an explanatory variable for expectations of future inflation. The expectation variables used are: the actual inflation rate (t + 1) and the Livingston Survey from the Philadelphia Fed. By using the different measures of expectations the author is able to compare several adaptive expectations models that appear in the literature and the rational expectations models for fit and forecast ability. The empirical results are such that the importance of including the rational expectations variable is evident even though the overall fit of the equation is comparable to one of the existing adaptive expectations models.     

A two-pillar DSGE monetary policy model for the euro area

The current financial crisis has revived the interest for monitoring both monetary and credit developments. Over the past two decades, consistent with the adoption of inflation targeting strategies by a growing number of central banks and the development of New Keynesian models for which monetary aggregates are largely irrelevant, money and credit have been progressively neglected in the conduct of monetary policy. A striking exception has been the Eurosystem, which has implemented a strategy known as the “two-pillar monetary policy strategy” giving a prominent role for money. In this paper, we develop a small optimizing model based on Ireland (2004), estimated on euro area data and featuring this two-pillar strategy. We evaluate an ECB-style cross-checking policy rule in a DSGE model with real balance effects of money. We find some evidence that indeed money plays a non-trivial role in explaining the euro area business cycle. This provides a rationale for the central bank to factor in monetary developments but also raises some issues regarding the reliability of M3 as an appropriate monetary indicator. We find some evidence that the ECB has systematically reacted to a filtered measure of money growth but weak evidence it has reacted more aggressively during excess money growth periods.     

How justified is abandoning money in the conduct of monetary policy in Australia on the grounds of instability in the money‐demand function?

The role of money in the design and conduct of monetary policy has reemerged as an important issue in both advanced and developing economies, especially since the 2007 global financial crisis. A growing body of recent literature suggests that the causal relationship between money supply growth and inflation remains intact across countries and over time and that this relation is not conditional on the stability of the money‐demand function or whether money is endogenous or exogenous. Moreover, critical for a rule‐based monetary policy is the presence of a long‐run stable money‐demand function, rather than a short‐run money‐demand model that may exhibit instability for many reasons, including problems with estimating a money‐demand model with high‐frequency data. Provided that a stable money‐demand function exists, it could be useful to establish long‐run equilibrium relations among money, output, prices, and exchange rates, as the classical monetary theory suggests. Within this analytical framework, this paper addresses the question of whether money has any role in the conduct of monetary policy in Australia. The conventional wisdom is that the money‐demand function in Australia has been unstable since the mid‐1980s due to financial deregulation and reforms; this led to a change in the strategy of monetary policy for price stability in the form of inflation targeting that ignores money insofar as inflation and its control are concerned. This paper reports empirical findings for Australia, obtained from a longer quarterly data series over the period 1960Q1–2015Q1, which suggest that instability in the narrow‐money‐demand function in Australia was primarily due to the exclusion of variables which have become important in the deregulated environment since the 1980s. These findings are confirmed by an expanded form of the narrow‐money‐demand function that was found stable over the past two decades, although it experienced multiple structural breaks over the study period. The paper draws the conclusion that abandoning the monetary aggregate as an instrument of monetary policy in Australia, under a rule‐based monetary policy such as inflation targeting, cannot be justified by instability in the money‐demand function or even by lack of a causal link between money supply growth and inflation.     

Money and inflation in Germany: A cointegration analysis

This paper analyses the relation between money and inflation in Germany in a cost-push/demand-pull model of an open small economy by means of cointegration methods. The full-information-maximum-likelihood method of Johansen as well as structural methods are applied to datasubsets and the full data set. The focus of the paper is on tests for overidentifying restrictions and for weak and strong exogeneity within these data sets. The result of the paper is that the money stock, the price level and gross national product are endogenous whereas the interest rate and the real import price are both weakly and strongly exogenous. By means of the price cointegration relation we illustrate how monetary targeting should react to imported inflation.     

中国经济转型与货币需求

本文采用"从一般到特殊"的动态建模方法对中国经济转型过程中的货币需求函数进行了再估计,通过引入市场化进程相对指数作为衡量经济转型的制度变量考察货币需求、经济增长、通货膨胀、利率和经济转型之间的相互关系。结果发现,尽管1978—2007年间30年的改革开放使得中国的经济体制和金融体系发生了较大的转型,但通过引入适当的制度变量,仍然可以得到稳定的货币需求函数。本文建立的货币需求动态模型证实了经济体制的市场化转型无论长短期都是拉动货币需求增加的因素,通货膨胀是解释货币量的有效外生解释变量,短期内利率变量对实际货币需求影响不显著,但其确实显著地进入了长期货币需求关系。     

Growth cycles and inflation in a model of the class struggle

The problems of price and wage inflation and unemployment are discussed here in a context of a model of class struggle developed by R. M. Goodwin. The basic Goodwin model which is an analog of the Volterra-Lotka preypredator model is extended to include actual and anticipated price inflation and excess capacity. Cyclical behavior of labor's share in national income and the employment ratio is studied around a Harrodian steady state. It is found that the presence of money illusion with respect to the actual rate of inflation in the wage bargaining equation is a stabilizing influence. With respect to anticipated inflation, local stability of equilibrium is no longer assured. The implications of this for Phillips curve analysis are also derived.     

Money,transactions and portfolio choice

Real money balances are held separately forconsumptionandportfolioreasons. When real balances are a state variable in the investor 's optimization problem, there is a specific inflation-hedging portfolio. An investor hedges against inflation when the effect of real money holdings on the marginal utility of wealth is negative. We show that a decrease in real balances due to inflation has two opposite effects on the marginal utility of wealth. On the one hand, the decrease in real balances reduces consumption, which in turn raises the marginal utility and decreases the marginal cost of consuming: this explains why an investor would normally hedge inflation. On the other hand, the decrease in real balances tends to increase the marginal cost of consuming. When this second effect dominates, we have the somewhat surprising result that the investor reverse-hedges inflation.     

Is Inflation Always and Everywhere a Monetary Phenomenon?*

Using a sample of about 160 countries over the last 30 years, we test for the quantity theory relationship between money and inflation. When analysing the full sample of countries, we find a strong positive relation between long‐run inflation and the money growth rate. The relation is not proportional, however. The strong link between inflation and money growth is almost wholly due to the presence of high‐(or hyper‐) inflation countries in the sample. The relationship between inflation and money growth for low‐inflation countries (on average less than 10% per annum over the last 30 years) is weak.     

资产选择、风险偏好与储蓄存款需求

本文以消费者最优资产选择模型为基础,采用局部均衡分析方法探讨了通货膨胀、股市收益波动、消费者风险偏好对储蓄存款需求的影响。2001年6月以后,通货膨胀方差下降,股市持续下跌,股市收益率下降,收益率方差也有所下降,但货币需求却加速增长。本文根据不同的相对风险回避指数,模拟了利率、通货膨胀、股市收益率、股市收益率方差等因素对2001年6月至2005年9月平均储蓄存款的影响。在适当的相对风险回避指数下,储蓄存款增加的30%左右可以由这些因素解释;如果不考虑GDP等规模变量,股市收益率下降是导致平均货币需求增长的主要因素。     

Post stabilization estimates of money demand in Croatia: error correction model using the bounds testing approach

This paper estimates an error correction model of money demand for Croatia over the post-stabilization period based on the ARDL bounds testing procedure. While industrial production is statistically insignificant for both the M1 and M1A money demand specifications, interest rates, inflation, and the real effective exchange rate have a negative and statistically significant impact. The error correction money demand models appear structurally stable based on the cumulative sum and cumulative sum of square tests.     

Incomplete markets and the output–inflation tradeoff

This paper analyses the effects of money shocks on macroeconomic aggregates in a tractable flexible-price, incomplete-markets environment that generates persistent wealth inequalities amongst agents. In this framework, current inflation redistribute wealth from the cash-rich employed to the cash-poor unemployed and induce the former to increase their labour supply in order to maintain their desired levels of consumption and precautionary savings. If the shocks are persistent, however, they also raise inflation expectations and thus deter the employed from saving and supplying labour. We relate the strength of these two inflation taxes to the underlying parameters of the model and study how they compete in determining the overall sign and slope of the implied ‘output–inflation tradeoff’ relation.     

Monetary Disequilibrium, Endogenous Money, Stability and the Determinacy of Inflation

This paper examines the stability of the disequilibrium money model, with endogenous money and transitory interest rate control by the Central Bank. In the tradition of the post-Keynesian literature, the money supply is determined by bank lending and disequilibrium between money demand and supply determines the business cycle. The rate of interest is assumed to react to an inflation target and inflation responds to the business cycle. The paper examines the stability of the model under three inflation response systems: the accelerationist model, adaptive expectations and rational expectations.
(J.E.L.: E3, E4, E5).     

Budget Deficits Expected Inflation and Short-Term Real Interest Rates: Evidence for the U.S.

This paper examines a number of issues concerning the determination of short-term real interest rates. We include actual inflation and several measures of expected inflation in order to determine whether empirical results are sensitive to the choice of the inflation variable. The results strongly suggest that the estimated coefficients are unaffected by the choice of the interest rate variable and, implicitly, the inflation variable. Deficits are not found to have a positive effect on all measures of the dependent variable, while increases in the real money supply and the inflation variables depress real interest rates. [311]