- Title
- The effect of economic uncertainty on narrow money demand and its stability in New Zealand: An empirical investigation
- Creator
- Hossain, Akhand Akhtar; Arwatchanakarn, Popkarn
- Relation
- Economic Analysis and Policy Vol. 68, Issue December 2020, p. 88-100
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eap.2020.09.002
- Publisher
- Economic Society of Australia Inc
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- The main objective of this paper is to investigate whether economic uncertainty affects narrow money demand in New Zealand and whether the specified money-demand function remains stable over time. New Zealand adopted inflation-targeting in the early 1990s by discarding monetary-targeting or any other strategy of monetary policy for price stability on the grounds that instability in the narrow money-demand function might sever the relationship among money, output, prices, interest rates, and exchange rates, as the classical monetary theory suggests. This paper specifies an augmented money-demand function for an open economy that includes economic uncertainty and inflation volatility as two additional determinants of money demand. Quarterly data for New Zealand for the period 1995Q1–2017Q4 is used to determine whether these variables remain significant in an augmented money-demand function in this country. The empirical results, obtained by the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration, suggest that there exists a cointegral relationship among variables in the specified model and that economic uncertainty negatively affects narrow money demand in New Zealand. Further, the empirical results, obtained by the non-linear ARDL (NARDL) approach, suggest that economic uncertainty affects narrow money demand asymmetrically. An increase in economic uncertainty lowers narrow money demand, while a decrease in economic uncertainty does not increase – and instead seems to decrease – narrow money demand. Unlike with economic uncertainty, an increase in inflation volatility, which represents inflation uncertainty, increases narrow money demand. Although it is not conclusively established in this paper, the effect of inflation uncertainty on narrow money-demand seems symmetric. The narrow money-demand function is found in this paper to have remained stable irrespective of whether the model is estimated by the ARDL or NARDL approach. This paper draws the conclusion that the abandonment of money in the formulation of monetary policy strategy, such as inflation-targeting in New Zealand, cannot be justified on the grounds of instability in the narrow money-demand function.
- Subject
- real narrow money balances; economic uncertainty; inflation volatility; stability of narrow money-demand function; monetary policy; New Zealand
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1434883
- Identifier
- uon:39538
- Identifier
- ISSN:0313-5926
- Language
- eng
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