Monetary and exchange policy of Kazakhstan: current problems and ways of improvement

The National Bank of Kazakhstan continues to pursue monetary policy in accordance with the principles of inflation targeting. As part of the medium-term strategy, the National Bank has reduced the target inflation corridor by one percentage point in 2020. Due to the global crisis of recent years, the National Bank has set a task to keep the inflation rate in the 4-6% corridor to stabilize the economy. The inflation rate at the end of 2020 was 7.5%. The National Bank has set a task to reduce this indicator to the level of the target corridor of 4-6% in 2021. Also, in conducting monetary policy, the National Bank has made decisions that have an anti-inflationary effect for the medium term, that is, the target level will decrease by 4% in 2021 and beyond. The preservation of monetary conditions by the regulator at a neutral level was characterized by a decrease in short-term rates after slow inflation. In 2019, against the background of a further decrease in inflation, it was decided to raise the base rate. At the same time, market participants may regard monetary conditions as the beginning of tightening. In Kazakhstan, the financial regulator sets the rate depending on the size of real and expected inflation in the country, external factors that determine the state of the balance of payments, as well as taking into account the need to maintain economic development. The article discusses the methods of conducting the monetary and monetary policy of Kazakhstan, as well as issues and ways to improve it.

Central Bank Credibility During COVID-19: Evidence from Japan

Japanese realized and expected inflation has been below the Bank of Japan’s two percent target for many years. We use the exogenous COVID-19 pandemic shock to examine the efficacy of monetary and fiscal policy responses for elevating inflation expectations from an arbitrage-free term structure model of nominal and real yields. We find that monetary and fiscal policy announcements during this period failed to lift inflation expectations, which instead declined notably and are projected to only slowly revert back to levels far below the announced target. Hence, our results illustrate the challenges faced in raising well-anchored low inflation expectations.

Household Inflation Expectations and Consumer Spending: Evidence from Panel Data

Recent research offers mixed results concerning the relationship between inflation expectations and consumption, using qualitative measures of readiness to spend. We revisit this question using survey panel data of actual spending from the U.S. between 2009 and 2012 that also allows us control for household heterogeneity. We find that durables spending increases with expected inflation only for selected types of households while nondurables spending does not respond to expected inflation. Moreover, spending decreases with expected unemployment. These results imply a limited stimulating effect of inflation expectations on aggregate consumption, which could be reversed if inflation and unemployment expectations move together.

Money supply, inflation and output: an empirically comparative analysis for Vietnam and China

PurposeThis study focuses on analyzing the relation between money supply, inflation and output in Vietnam and China.Design/methodology/approachUsing the error correction model and the vector autoregression model (ECM and VAR) and the canonical cointegration regression (CCR), the study shows similar patterns of these variable relations between the two economies.FindingsThe study points out the difference in the estimated coefficients between the two countries with different economic scales. While inflation in Vietnam is strongly influenced by expected inflation and output growth, inflation in China is strongly influenced by money supply growth and output growth.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical and comparative research on the relation between money supply, inflation and output for Vietnam and China. The study demonstrates that the relationship between money supply, inflation and output is still true in case of transition economies.

Can Recurrent Neural Networks Predict Inflation in Euro Zone as Good as Professional Forecasters?

This paper investigates whether a specific type of a recurrent neural network, in particular Jordan neural network (JNN), captures the expected inflation better than commonly used feedforward neural networks and traditional parametric time-series models. It also considers competing survey-based and model-based expected inflation towards ex-post actual inflation to find whose predictions are more accurate; predictions from survey respondents or forecasting modelers. Further, it proposes neural network modelling strategy when dealing with nonstationary time-series which exhibit long-memory property and nonlinear dependence with respect to lagged inputs and exogenous inputs as well. Following this strategy, overfitting problem was reduced until no improvement in forecasting accuracy of expected inflation is achieved. The main finding is that JNN predicts inflation in euro zone quite accurately within forecasting horizon of 2 years. Regarding rational expectation principle we have found a set of demand-pull and cost-push inflation characteristics as exogenous inputs which helps in reducing overfitting problem of recurrent neural network even more. The sample includes euro zone aggregated monthly observations from January 2000 to December 2019. The results also confirm that inflation expectations obtained from JNN are consistent with Survey of professional forecasters (SPF), and thus, monetary policy makers can use JNN as a complementary tool in shortcomings of other inflation expectations measures.

Expected Inflation Phenomena on Inflation and Unemployment Tradeoff - Evidence from Indonesia

This study is about Indonesian Phillips curve from 1990 to 2019 using a VAR model. I found inflation and unemployment tradeoff, but expected inflation is negative. Negative expected inflation will face difficulties to BI in managing interest rate stemmed from economic shocks. Monetary contraction will decrease output and increase both unemployment and inflation. Conversely, monetary expansion does not experience a significant output growth. Monetary expansion should be maintained at a longer period to increase output and purchasing power, then expected inflation will undergo a dynamic process to become positive as modified Phillips curve suggested. Keywords: expected inflation, inflation and unemployment tradeoff, Phillips curve JEL Classification: E31, E52, O42

Inflation and Marginal Costs in Open Economies: The New Keynesian Hybrid Phillips Curve

The inclusion of the inflation rate in wage determination affects the behavior of economic actors and also positions the expected inflation as one of the main factors in determining inflation. Changes in currency parities in developing countries, which make their production dependent on imports, affect costs and prices. Moreover, changes in labor market structures resulting from free capital flows affect employment and the inflation phenomenon. This paper analyzes the current inflation, expected inflation, and output gap relations with the fuzzy linear regression method in the context of the Turkish economy, which has inflation and effective external dependency. Based on the results obtained using marginal cost instead of the output gap, policy recommendations are provided. The scope of this paper comprises the New Keynesian Hybrid Phillips curve that includes external factors. The relationship between inflation and relevant variables is statistically significant and positive, proving the fuzzy linear regression results as promising. To obtain economic stability and policy precautions, we must examine whether the use of tight monetary policies for coping with inflation leads to unemployment and whether expansionist monetary policies lead to inflation.

Inflation puzzles, the Phillips Curve and output expectations: new perspectives from the Euro Zone

Confidence in the Phillips Curve (PC) as predictor of inflation developments along the business cycle has been shaken by recent “inflation puzzles” in advanced countries, such as the “missing disinflation” in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the “missing inflation” in the years of recovery, to which the Euro-Zone “excess deflation” during the post-crisis depression may be added. This paper proposes a newly specified Phillips Curve model, in which expected inflation, instead of being treated as an exogenous explanatory variable of actual inflation, is endogenized. The idea is simply that if the PC is used to foresee inflation, then its expectational component should in some way be the result of agents using the PC itself. As a consequence, the truly independent explanatory variables of inflation turn out to be the output gaps and the related forecast errors by agents, with notable empirical consequences. The model is tested with the Euro-Zone data 1999–2019 showing that it may provide a consistent explanation of the “inflation puzzles” by disentangling the structural component from the expectational effects of the PC.

International Real Estate Review

Using a non-causality approach based on the conventional approach of Fama and Schwert (1977), cointegration method in Johansen (1988), and autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) cointegration technique in Pesaran et al. (2001) and Granger et al. (2000), this study examines the inflation hedging effectiveness of residential property in three of the largest emerging market (EM) economies: China, India and Russia. While the results of the Fama and Schwert (1977) regression indicate that residential properties in China and Russia provide a short-term hedge against expected inflation, this is not the case for those in India against both expected and unexpected inflation. Consistent with the results of the developed economies, the Johansen and ARDL cointegration results provide strong evidence to support the hypothesis that inflation and the residential properties in the three largest EM economies are cointegrated. This implies that the residential properties in these three countries provide a long-term hedge for inflation. In addition, the causality results show evidence that inflation has a lead effect on residential property prices in India over the long run. The empirical results of the cointegration tests confirm that residential properties could be considered as a reliable hedge against inflation for EMs in the long run and suggest that investors should overweigh their investment in residential property assets during periods of persistent inflation in EMs.

Does the Mundell-Fleming Model Apply to Malaysia's Output?

Based on an extended Mundell-Fleming model, this paper finds that both fiscal expansion and monetary expansion raise output in Malaysia and that a lower real interest rate, a higher stock value, a lower real oil price and a lower expected inflation rate increase output. Hence, a managed floating system with no predetermined path of the exchange rate adopted by Malaysia may lead to better outcomes than the predictions of the Mundell- Fleming model that fiscal expansion does not raise output under a floating exchange rate but increases output under a fixed exchange rate whereas monetary expansion increases output under a floating exchange rate but does not affect output under a fixed exchange rate (Mankiw, 2019).