Reserve Accumulation and Money Supply in China: A Time-Varying Analysis

This study investigates the causal relationship between reserve accumulation and money supply in China over the period of 1999 M1–2015 M6. First, we use a Granger causality test and find that there is a unidirectional relationship from money supply growth to reserve accumulation growth; however, taking structural changes into account, we assess stability of parameters of the estimated vector autoregressive models. We find both the short-run and long-run relationships between money supply growth and reserve accumulation growth estimated using full-sample data are unstable over the sample period. This suggests that full-sample causality tests cannot be relied upon. We turn to propose a time-varying (bootstrap) rolling-window approach to revisit the dynamic causal relationship between the two variables. We find that two variables have causal relationships in some sub-periods. We argue that reserve accumulation growth has put pressure on money supply growth. However, in general, sterilization is effective, but not in few months 2006–2007. And money supply has a positive reserve accumulation from the second half of 2001–2003 because RMB was undervalued under the fixed exchange rate regime. We argue that the improvements of monetary policy and the exchange rate regime are crucial to break the relationship between reserve accumulation growth and the money supply growth.