The demand for money in EEC countries

This paper examines the demand for money in the EEC countries and is focussed on five issues. First it starts form a common economic framework, which allows for shifts from M 2 to non-money assets and vice versa. Second, special attention is given to the dynamic structure of the statistical model in order to obtain meaningful conclusions on, e.g., the speed of adjustment of actual to optimal money holdings. Third, the study is entirely based on a uniform set of quarterly data for the eight countries concerned. Fourth, the paper presents a careful examination of the residuals and, finally, analyses the predictive behaviour of the estimated models. For all countries we found long-run income elasticities greater than unity and interest rate elasticities clustered around -0.20. The impact of inflation and the business cycle variable appeared to be significant in the majority of countries considered.