William Barnett, the coeditor of this volume, introduced modern economic index number theory into monetary economics and this book comprises a focussed and unified collection of his most important publications in this area. It provides a clear and systematic development of the state-of-the-art in monetary and financial aggregation theory.
First published in 1999, this volume examines the role and effects of financial liberalisation in ten deregulated Asian developing countries including Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Thailand. These areas experienced significant financial and economic changes between the ‘financially repressed economies’ of the 1970s through to the 1990s. Muzafar Shah Habibullah approaches this issue in two parts. Part 1 provides empirical evidence of relationships between monetary aggregates, nominal income and price level. In part 2, he offers an early attempt to evaluate the Divisia monetary aggregate as an alternative to the Simple-sum aggregate as an indicator for the financial and economic situation of Asian developing countries.
Policymakers and business practitioners are eager to gain access to reliable information on the state of the economy for timely decision making. More so now than ever. Traditional economic indicators have been criticized for delayed reporting, out-of-date methodology, and neglecting some aspects of the economy. Recent advances in economic theory, econometrics, and information technology have fueled research in building broader, more accurate, and higher-frequency economic indicators. This volume contains contributions from a group of prominent economists who address alternative economic indicators, including indicators in the financial market, indicators for business cycles, and indicators of economic uncertainty.
This book provides a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the problem of the definition of money and investigates the gains that can be achieved by a rigorous use of microeconomic- and aggregation-theoretic foundations in the construction of monetary aggregates. It provides readers with key aspects of monetary economics and macroeconomics, including monetary aggregation, demand systems, flexible functional forms, long-run monetary neutrality, the welfare cost of inflation, and nonlinear chaotic dynamics.This book offers the following conclusions: the simple-sum approach to monetary aggregation and log-linear money demand functions, currently used by central banks, are inappropriate for monetary policy purposes; the choice of monetary aggregation procedure is crucial in evaluating the welfare cost of inflation; the inter-related problems of monetary aggregation and money demand will be successfully investigated in the context of flexible functional forms that satisfy theoretical regularity globally, pointing the way forward to useful and productive research.
The leading researchers from central banks and universities around the world debate issues central to the performance of Divisia monetary aggregates both in theory and in practice. The overall conclusion is that Divisia monetary aggregates outperform their simple sum counterparts in a wide range of applications the world over. The book is the first volume-length study of empirical data and theoretical research on the subject.
A stable money demand forms the cornerstone in formulating and conducting monetary policy. Consequently, numerous theoretical and empirical studies have been conducted in both industrial and developing countries to evaluate the determinants and the stability of the money demand function. This paper briefly reviews the theoretical work, tracing the contributions of several researchers beginning from the classical economists, and explains relevant empirical issues in modeling and estimating money demand functions. Notably, it summarizes the salient features of a number of recent studies that applied cointegration/error-correction models in the 1990s, and it features a bibliography to aid in research on demand for money.
Almost half a century has elapsed since the demand for money began to attract widespread attention from economists and econometricians, and it has been a topic of ongoing controversy and research ever since. Interest in the topic stemmed from three principal sources. First of all, there was the matter of the internal dynamics of macroeco nomics, to which Harry Johnson drew attention in his 1971 Ely Lecture on "The Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counter-Revolution," American Economic Review 61 (May 1971). The main lesson about money that had been drawn from the so-called "Keynesian Revolution" was - rightly or wrongly - that it didn't matter all that much. The inherited wisdom that undergraduates absorbed in the 1950s was that macroeconomics was above all about the determination of income and employment, that the critical factors here were saving and investment decisions, and that monetary factors, to the extent that they mattered at all, only had an influence on these all important variables through a rather narrow range of market interest rates. Conventional wisdom never goes unchallenged in economics, except where its creators manage to control access to graduate schools and the journals, and it is with no cynical intent that I confirm Johnson's suggestion that those of us who embarked on academic careers in the '60s found in this wisdom a ready-made target.
''In summary, the book is valuable as a textbook both at the advanced undergraduate level and at the graduate level. It is also very useful for the economist who wants to be brought up-to-date on theoretical and empirical research on exchange rate behaviour.'' ""Journal of International Economics""
