IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pre/wpaper/200804.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Measuring the Welfare Cost of Inflation in South Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Rangan Gupta

    (Department of Economics, University of Pretoria)

  • Josine Uwilingiye

    (Department of Economics, University of Pretoria)

Abstract

In this paper, we estimate the long-run equilibrium relationship between money balance as a ratio of income and the Treasury bill rate for the period of 1965:02 to 2007:01, and, in turn, use the relationship to obtain welfare cost estimates of inflation. Using the Johansen (1991, 1995) technique, we estimate a log-log specification and a semi-log model of the above relationship. Based on the fits of the specifications, we decided to rely more on the welfare cost measure obtained under the log-log money demand model. Our estimates suggest that the welfare cost of inflation for South Africa ranges between 0.34 percent and 0.67 percent of GDP, for a band of 3 to 6 percent of inflation. Thus, it seems that the SARB’s current inflation target band of 3-6 percent is not too poorly designed in terms of welfare.

Suggested Citation

  • Rangan Gupta & Josine Uwilingiye, 2008. "Measuring the Welfare Cost of Inflation in South Africa," Working Papers 200804, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:pre:wpaper:200804
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Peter N. Ireland, 2009. "On the Welfare Cost of Inflation and the Recent Behavior of Money Demand," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(3), pages 1040-1052, June.
    2. Richard G. Anderson & Robert H. Rasche, 2001. "The remarkable stability of monetary base velocity in the United States, 1919-1999," Working Papers 2001-008, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    3. Kirsten L. Ludi & Marc Ground, 2006. "Investigating the Bank-Lending Channel in South Africa: A VAR Approach," Working Papers 200604, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics.
    4. David F. Hendry & Katarina Juselius, 2001. "Explaining Cointegration Analysis: Part II," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 1), pages 75-120.
    5. Johansen, Soren, 1995. "Likelihood-Based Inference in Cointegrated Vector Autoregressive Models," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198774501, Decembrie.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zia-Ur- Rahman, 2019. "Influence of Excessive Expenditure of the Government in Perspective of Interest Rate and Money Circulation Which in Turn Affects the Growing Process in Pakistan," Asian Journal of Economics and Empirical Research, Asian Online Journal Publishing Group, vol. 6(2), pages 120-129.
    2. Andrew Phiri, 2012. "Threshold effects and inflation persistence in South Africa," Journal of Financial Economic Policy, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 4(3), pages 247-269, July.
    3. Eliphas Ndou & Nombulelo Gumata & Mthuli Ncube & Eric Olson, 2013. "Working Paper 189 - An Empirical Investigation of the Taylor Curve in South Africa," Working Paper Series 992, African Development Bank.
    4. Lumengo Bonga-Bonga & Ntsakeseni Letitia Lebese, 2019. "Rethinking The Current Inflation Target Range In South Africa," Journal of Developing Areas, Tennessee State University, College of Business, vol. 53(2), pages 13-27, April-Jun.
    5. Irfan Ahmad Shah & Manmohan Lal Agarwal & Srikanta Kundu, 2019. "Welfare Cost of Inflation: Evidence from India," Journal of Quantitative Economics, Springer;The Indian Econometric Society (TIES), vol. 17(4), pages 781-799, December.
    6. Steven F. Koch & Adel Bosch, 2009. "Inflation and the Household: Towards a Measurement of the Welfare Costs of Inflation," Working Papers 200917, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. repec:rza:wpaper:068 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Ruixiaoxiao Zhang & Geoffrey QP Shen & Meng Ni & Johnny Wong, 2020. "The relationship between energy consumption and gross domestic product in Hong Kong (1992–2015): Evidence from sectoral analysis and implications on future energy policy," Energy & Environment, , vol. 31(2), pages 215-236, March.
    3. Ihle, Rico & Brümmer, Bernhard & Thompson, Stanley R., 2009. "Spatial market integration in the EU beef and veal sector: policy decoupling and export bans," DARE Discussion Papers 0913, Georg-August University of Göttingen, Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development (DARE).
    4. Maurizio Bovi, 2014. "Shocks and the Expectations Formation Process. A Tale of Two Expectations," Natural Field Experiments 00390, The Field Experiments Website.
    5. Nnaemeka Vincent Emodi & Taha Chaiechi & ABM Rabiul Alam Beg, 2018. "The impact of climate change on electricity demand in Australia," Energy & Environment, , vol. 29(7), pages 1263-1297, November.
    6. Gao Lu Zou & Kwong Wing Chau, 2015. "Determinants and Sustainability of House Prices: The Case of Shanghai, China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 7(4), pages 1-25, April.
    7. Stewart, Kenneth G., 2024. "The simple macroeconometrics of the quantity theory and the welfare cost of inflation," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 162(C).
    8. Miller, Stephen M. & Martins, Luis Filipe & Gupta, Rangan, 2019. "A Time-Varying Approach Of The Us Welfare Cost Of Inflation," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 23(2), pages 775-797, March.
    9. Theodore Panagiotidis & Emilie Rutledge, 2004. "Oil and gas market in the UK: evidence from a cointegration approach," Discussion Paper Series 2004_18, Department of Economics, Loughborough University, revised Nov 2004.
    10. Mustafa Ismihan & Kivilcim Metin-Ozcan & Aysit Tansel, 2002. "Macroeconomic Instability, Capital Accumulation and Growth: The Case of Turkey 1963-1999," Working Papers 0209, Economic Research Forum, revised 21 Mar 2002.
    11. Julia Campos & Neil R. Ericsson & David F. Hendry, 2005. "General-to-specific modeling: an overview and selected bibliography," International Finance Discussion Papers 838, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    12. Borozan, Djula, 2013. "Exploring the relationship between energy consumption and GDP: Evidence from Croatia," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 373-381.
    13. Chee Seng Cheong & Patrick J. Wilson & Ralf Zurbruegg, 2009. "An analysis of the long‐run impact of fixed income and equity market performance on Australian and UK securitised property markets," Journal of Property Investment & Finance, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 27(3), pages 259-276, April.
    14. Filip, Ondrej & Janda, Karel & Kristoufek, Ladislav & Zilberman, David, 2019. "Food versus fuel: An updated and expanded evidence," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 152-166.
    15. Bigsten, Arne & Durevall, Dick, 2004. "Trade Reform and Wage Inequality in Kenya, 1964-2000," Working Papers in Economics 148, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    16. António Duarte, 2009. "The Portuguese Disinflation Process: Analysis of Some Costs and Benefits," Transition Studies Review, Springer;Central Eastern European University Network (CEEUN), vol. 16(1), pages 157-173, May.
    17. Mohammad Mahabub Alam, 2018. "The Determinants of CPI Inflation in Bangladesh, 1980-2016," Asian Journal of Economic Modelling, Asian Economic and Social Society, vol. 6(4), pages 441-461, December.
    18. Simón Sosvilla-Rivero & Emma García, "undated". "Purchasing Power Parity Revisited," Working Papers 2003-20, FEDEA.
    19. Fragiskos Archontakis & Rocco Mosconi, 2021. "Søren Johansen and Katarina Juselius: A Bibliometric Analysis of Citations through Multivariate Bass Models," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 9(3), pages 1-28, August.
    20. Lin, Boqiang & Xu, Lin, 2015. "Energy conservation of electrolytic aluminum industry in China," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 676-686.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Cointegration; Money Demand; Welfare Cost of Inflation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • E41 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Demand for Money
    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pre:wpaper:200804. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Rangan Gupta (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/decupza.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.