Oil price shocks and producer prices in Taiwan: an application of non-linear error-correction models

This study estimated the short-term and long-term pass-through effects of oil prices on inflation in Taiwan from 1981M1-2011M5, employing the producer price general index and various basic sub-indices for evaluation. The empirical results show that oil prices have long-term and short-term pass-through effects on Taiwan’s producer price indices. Moreover, producer prices have significant non-linear error-correction relationships with the oil price, output and wages, suggesting asymmetric and time-variant properties of error correction. When the deviation of price in the equilibrium is greater, the error-correction adjustment will be faster. Our findings could therefore enable the monetary authorities and manufacturers to formulate a more effective policy from the oil price shocks.     

What to Aim for? The Choice of an Inflation Objective when Openness Matters

Inflation targeting countries generally define the inflation objective in terms of the consumer price index. Studies in the academic literature, however, reach conflicting conclusions concerning which measure of inflation a central bank should target in a small open economy. This paper examines the properties of domestic, CPI, and real-exchange-rate-adjusted (REX) inflation targeting. In one class of open economy New Keynesian models there is an isomorphism between optimal policy in an open versus closed economy. In the type of model we consider, where the real exchange rate appears in the Phillips curve, this isomorphism breaks down; openness matters. REX inflation targeting restores the isomorphism but this may not be desirable. Instead, under domestic and CPI inflation targeting the exchange rate channel can be exploited to enhance the effects of monetary policy. Our results indicate that CPI inflation targeting delivers price stability across the three inflation objectives and will be desirable to a central bank with a high aversion to inflation instability. CPI inflation targeting also does a better job of stabilizing the real exchange rate and interest rate which is an advantage from the standpoint of financial stability. REX inflation targeting does well in achieving output stability and has an advantage if demand shocks are predominant. In general, the choice of the inflation objective affects the trade-offs between policy goals and thus policy choices and outcomes.     

关于后经济危机时期度量我国通货膨胀指标研究

在评估通货膨胀风险前,需要选择一个能够反映多结构的价格指标作为通货膨胀的度量指标。而构建合理的通货膨胀先行指标体系是许多中央银行预测通货膨胀的重要手段,也是我国中央银行面临的重要任务之一。本文分别从微观和宏观两类指标度量了我国通货膨胀程度。     

通胀、通胀预期和货币政策——基于中国2001—2010年数据的实证研究

文章用两种方法测度了我国通胀预期：（1）未来物价预期指数衡量通胀预期;（2）ARMA模型对通胀的预测值。并计量分析了影响通胀预期的因素,结果显示：CPI上升、正产出缺口增加和广义货币供应量增加,是形成通胀预期的主要因素。利率、人民币汇率和食品价格对通胀预期的形成作用不显著和影响较小。因此,存款准备金率动态微调,是目前管理好通胀预期的最好选择。     

Pass-through Effects of Global Commodity Prices on China＇s Inflation： An Empirical Investigation

The present paper uses a two-step approach to estimate the pass-through effects of changes in international commodity prices and the RMB exchange rate on domestic consumer price inflation in China. We first estimate the pass-through effects of international commodity prices on producer prices and then estimate the pass-through effects of producer price inflation on consumer price inflation. We find that a l O-percent increase in international commodity prices would lead to China＇ s producer prices increasing by 1.2 percent 3 months later, which in turn would increase China＇ s domestic inflation by 0.24 percent over the same period. However, a 10-percent appreciation of the RMB exchange rate against the US dollar would help to reduce increases in producer prices by 4.4 percent over the following 3 months, which in turn would lead to a 0. 89-percent decline in consumer price inflation over the same period. Our findings suggest that appreciation of the RMB in an environment of rising global commodity prices and a weak US dollar could be an effective instrument to help contain inflation in China.     

Dilemma of the Silver Standard Economies: The Case of China

Exchange rate commitments implied in the silver standard originally anchored China's monetary policy and the inflation rate in the early republican period. It was believed that China's free silver standard acted as a natural check on the excessive issuing of notes by warlords and local governments. This consensus view, however, overlooks the fact that the silver standard was inherently unstable because it left no room for monetary policy to stabilize output and inflation. This article employs a formal structural model to show that a fiat currency unlinked to fluctuations in the price of silver that allows government to implement self‐adjusting monetary policies would further stabilize China's output and inflation.     

Commodity prices and monetary policy in emerging East Asia during the global financial crisis

In the first phase of the global financial crisis, rising inflation was a major concern for emerging East Asian central banks. Coupled with a slowing US economy, regional central banks faced a monetary policy dilemma of either addressing higher inflation or supporting moderate growth. Higher food and fuel prices were the major drivers of headline inflation. Their causes, however, were a confluence of mutually reinforcing cyclical and structural factors. Understandably, different economies faced a different balance of risks between price stability and growth; but to attribute the inflation to supply shocks alone was misleading. This was unsettling given that inflation and inflation expectations were on the rise, and without much credibility, the reluctance of many central banks to raise interest rates risked repeating the mistake the advanced economies made in the 1970s. Without credibility, inflation expectations are unlikely to be well anchored. To gain credibility, a central bank must ‘walk‐the‐talk’, and understandably it must have the autonomy to do so.     

Revisiting the Exchange Rate Pass‐Through to Inflation in Africa’s Two Largest Economies: Nigeria and South Africa

This paper revisits the exchange rate pass‐through (ERPT) to inflation in Nigeria and South Africa by incorporating structural breaks and using time series variables, namely the consumer price index, nominal effective exchange rate, gross domestic product, and crude oil price. Based on the Maki cointegration test and a flexible estimation approach of the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model, our empirical evidence suggests that the long‐ and short‐run ERPT to inflation is complete for Nigeria, while for South Africa it is incomplete both in the long run and short run. This result indicates that prices are stickier in South Africa compared to Nigeria. The comparison between Nigeria and South Africa confirms the role of inflation targeting and central bank credibility on the ERPT. The results divulge further that output growth in Nigeria increases inflation in the long run while it is anti‐inflationary in the short run. For South Africa, the effect of output growth is negatively insignificant. In addition, the long‐run effect of oil price is negative and significant for Nigeria, while for South Africa the short‐run effect of oil price is positive and significant. Therefore, the findings of this paper will assist the monetary authorities to achieve monetary policy objectives.     

ARE AFRICAN CENTRAL BANKS SUFFICIENTLY INDEPENDENT FOR MONETARY CONVERGENCE?

Central bank independence (CBI) is currently a widely debated and topical issue commanding the centre point of many economical and political debates, filling the pages of many scholarly journals. Both central bank independence and accountability are currently regarded as necessary best practices for achieving price stability. The importance of CBI rests on the premise that inflation is primarily a monetary phenomenon, and that the cost of reducing inflation can be lowered by an independent central bank with credibility. Support for CBI also stems from the argument that the power to create money should generally be separated from the power to spend it. This is even more relevant for countries with weak political institutions. However, various studies (cited below) detected lower inflation in those countries where independence of their central banks is the strongest. Countries all over – including some on the African continent – have increased the independence of their central banks accordingly.     

Macroeconomic policy,output, and inflation in the former Czechoslovakia: Some evidence from the VAR analysis

Both macroeconomic policy and structural adjustment factors influenced the dynamics of output and inflation in the former Czechoslovakia during the first phase of its transition from central planning to markets. The results of VAR analysis indicate that, following price liberalization, the impact of structural adjustment processes on the level of output was somewhat stronger than the impact of macroeconomic policy. Moreover, it seems likely that a "looser" macroeconomic policy—advocated by many as a countermeasure to a large decline in industrial production—would only worsen the situation, bringing both higher inflation and a larger decline in industrial production.     

Cereal stocks,food aid and food security for the poor

This paper reviews recent events in world cereals markets, and argues that a significant proportion of the 1972–74 price increases resulted essentially from panic buying by a number of governments which controlled their countries' grain trade. Under these circumstances, a price stabilizing buffer stock would be beneficial, especially for poor countries in conjunction with food aid and emergency relief provisions. However, major producer countries might well lose from price stabilization, and may stand in the way of international agreement on buffer stocks.     

Production theory under uncertain inflation

Summary and Conclusions This paper examines Chen's [1980] model of asset valuation under uncertain inflation in order to derive a static and comparative static theory of production by a competitive firm. Given the value maximizing and the price taking assumptions, the firm behaves as a profit-maximizer. The sole effect of uncertain inflation is to distort the price structure. that is, the firm adjusts the expected price of an input or output to reflect the systematic risk of that price. Because a change in circumstances can affect the systematic risk of a given price, assessing the effects of a specific policy or event solely in terms of its effect on expected price can be misleading. Parametric variations affect the structure of certainty equivalent prices. Therefore, the comparative static derivatives of the value maximizing firm emerge as extensions of the comparative static derivatives of the profit maximizing firm under certainty. Many of these comparative static derivatives are of determinant sign. The effects of changes in market uncertainty and in inflation uncertainty, while they can be characterized mathematically, cannot be signed in the general case. Cross-sectional studies indicate wide variation in the effects of inflation, so that the preceding theoretical results appear plausible. Finally, in view of the wealth of static and comparative static results which can be derived from Chen's model, that model provides a convenient benchmark against which to judge other models. Precisely because of its simple nature, Chen's model is ideal for establishing limits of analysis.     

The liquidity effect in a flexible-price monetary model

This paper examines the impact of macroeconomic policy shocksin a flexible-price dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE)model with money. Rather than adopting a money supply rule,monetary policy is modelled as a central bank using a simpleinterest rate rule (Taylor rule). Without assuming price stickinessor frictions in financial markets, this model is found to accountfor liquidity effects, generate higher persistence in outputand inflation, and capture the positive unconditional cross-correlationsrelating inflation and output.     

Inflation in developing Asia

Inflation emerged as the single biggest macroeconomic challenge confronting developing Asia during 2007–2008, although inflationary pressures have abated since the second half of 2008 due to the global crisis. This paper empirically examines the relative importance of different sources of inflation in developing Asia. In particular, it tests the widely held view that the region's inflationary surge during 2007–2008 was primarily the result of external price factors such as oil and food shocks. Our central empirical result is that, contrary to popular misconception, Asia's inflation is largely homegrown and has arisen due to excess aggregate demand and inflationary expectations, rather than external price shocks. This suggests monetary policy will remain a powerful tool in fighting inflation in Asia, as well as in defusing the risks of deflation.     

Price and Output Stability under Price-Level Targeting

It is commonly believed that a monetary policy that targets the price level reduces the long-term variability of the price level, but only at the cost of increased variability of both inflation and output. We develop a model in which the one-step-ahead variance of output and the price level are lower under price-level targeting than under inflation targeting. This increased stability under price-level targeting works through an interest-rate channel that, to our knowledge, has not previously been emphasized in the literature. Surprisingly, if the sensitivity of demand to the real rate of interest is high enough, then the variance of inflation can also be lower under price-level targeting than under inflation targeting.     

House Prices and the Stance of Monetary Policy: The Case of Korea

Abstract

This paper is an empirical investigation on whether the Bank of Korea should respond to the housing price developments in conducting monetary policy. For that aim, we construct a small scale empirical model of the Korean economy, simulate the estimated model with a set of alternative monetary policy rules, and compare the stabilization performances of those rules. There turns out to be ample room for further stabilization of inflation and output, if the central bank shifts from the historically conducted monetary policy rule to the optimal rule. The stabilization gains under the optimal rule, however, are not attributable to additional policy indicators (such as housing price inflation) the optimal rule involves. Rather, the optimal rule improves upon the historical one because the former takes a quite different reaction scheme toward the historical policy indicators. Moreover, as long as the Bank of Korea maintains appropriate reactions to the historical policy indicators, housing price inflation does not contain much extra information for further stabilization     

DETERMINANTS OF INFLATION IN GHANA: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the factors accounting for inflation dynamics in Ghana using the bounds test and other econometric approaches. We find that real output, nominal exchange rate, broad money supply, nominal interest rate and fiscal deficit play a dominant role in the inflationary process in Ghana. To the extent that output growth by far has the strongest impact on inflation, targeting supply‐side constraints will help moderate price inflation. The paper concludes that inflation in Ghana is explained by a combination of structural and monetary factors consistent with prior studies.     

What does South Korean inflation targeting target?

This paper characterises South Korean monetary policy in the period of explicit inflation targeting that started in 1999. We calculate Bank of Korea's parameters in the policy objective function, conditional on an estimated macro-model. We show that this central bank appears to have pursued optimal policy geared towards achieving price stability, while displaying a considerable degree of interest rate smoothing. In addition, the central bank loss function is estimated to include negligible weights on output and exchange-rate variability.     

Is Delayed Disinflation More Costly?

An often-stated piece of monetary policy wisdom is that postponing disinflation raises the ultimate cost of disinflation. However, there is little empirical work that directly tests the validity of this view. This paper is a study of the relation between the duration of inflation and the cost of subsequent disinflation using 67 disinflation episodes in OECD countries from 1960 through 1993. The estimates indicate that delaying disinflation raises the output loss per unit of inflation reduction, although the effect is not statistically significant in all models. The largest marginal effects of delay occur soon after inflation is allowed to get under way, a finding consistent with a rapid decline in the credibility of the inflating central bank.     

Why Speed Doesn’t Kill: Learning to Believe in Disinflation

Central bankers generally prefer to reduce inflation gradually. We show that a central bank may try to convince the private sector of its commitment to price stability by choosing to reduce inflation quickly. We call this “teaching by doing”. We find that allowing for teaching by doing effects always speeds up the disinflation and leads to lower inflation persistence. So, we clarify why “speed” in the disinflation process does not necessarily “kill” in the sense of creating large output losses.