Monetary policy and inflation in Brazil (1975-2000): a VAR estimation

• Autor(a) principal: Minella,André
• Data de Publicação: 2003
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Revista Brasileira de Economia (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0034-71402003000300005
• topic: monetary policy; inflation; interest rate; money; Brazil

This paper investigates monetary policy and basic macroeconomic relationships involving output, inflation rate, interest rate, and money in Brazil. Based on a vector autoregressive (VAR) estimation, it compares three different periods: moderately-increasing inflation (1975-1985), high inflation (1985-1994), and low inflation (1994-2000). The main results are the following: monetary policy shocks have significant effects on output; monetary policy shocks do not induce a reduction in the inflation rate in the first two periods, but there are indications that they have gained power to affect prices after the Real Plan was launched; monetary policy does not usually respond rapidly or actively to inflation-rate and output innovations; in the recent period, the interest rate responds intensely to financial crises; positive interest-rate shocks are accompanied by a decline in money in all the three periods; the degree of inflation persistence is substantially lower in the recent period.