Yeong-Chun Park
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 310
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This paper investigates various long-run relationships among the level and variability of money growth, inflation and real output growth using cross-section analysis based on 90 countries' time series data. The empirical results presented in this paper support the hypothesis that the variability of inflation is positively related to the level of inflation, and also suggest the existence of the threshold level of inflation for the sample period of the 1980s and early 1990s. The results also show that inflation variability appears to have insignificant relationships with the long-run average growth rate of real output overall. The positive relationship between two variables prevails during the 1970s, but this relationship weakens considerably during the 1980s and early 1990s. The OECD group has consistently positive slope coefficients for all considered sample periods. The empirical results of this paper also confirm the well-known proposition that money is very closely related to the rate of inflation, And, overall, the growth rate of money supply does not seem to have strong relationship with the long-run real output growth rate. However, the OECD group shows weak positive relationship between two variables, which appears to be the result of relatively strong positive correlation especially during the 1970s. For the Asian group, one of the fastest economic growth groups, the growth rate of money supply does not have one-for-one relationship with inflation, and has strong positive relationship with real output growth. This paper does not support the proposition of a significant negative relationship between the variability of money growth and the average growth rate of real output. However, especially after 1980, the relationship changes to negative. The evidence presented in this paper shows that both the level or variability of inflation and the level or variability of money growth has positive relationship with the variability of real output growth. This result suggests that we may have to consider an additional welfare cost of high inflation or high money growth (and high variability of those) since they tend to induce unstable economic growth pattern even though they play no important role on the determination of the long-run average growth rate of real output.