Inflation and Fiscal Deficits: The Irrelevance of Debt and Money Financing

December 1, 1992

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José M. Barrionuevo Inflation and Fiscal Deficits: The Irrelevance of Debt and Money Financing, (USA: International Monetary Fund, 1992) accessed December 26, 2024

Disclaimer: This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF.The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate

Summary

The purpose of this paper is to present a model that circumvents the requirement of explicitly setting a period in which the fiscal budget is to be balanced, yet implies that increases in the growth of public debt are bound to increase inflation when there is no perceived commitment to reduce the fiscal deficit. The model is based on a modified version of the cash in advance constraint. The results of numerical simulations suggest that an increase in the growth of debt to finance current consumption leads to an equal increase in inflation. The timing of this increase varies with the size of the deficit and the pace of economic growth. It is shown that small increases in small deficits yield fairly significant increases in inflation. Three policy conclusions are offered.

Subject: Credit, Government debt management, Government debt planning, Inflation, Money, Prices, Public debt, Public financial management (PFM)

Keywords: Credit, Debt, Debt growth, Debt policy, Debt-output ratio, Deficit, Europe, Government debt management, Government debt planning, Growth policy, Inflation, Inflation aftermath, Inflation consequence, Inflation path, Irrelevance proposition, Model of inflation, Money model, WP

Publication Details

Pages:

32
Volume:

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DOI:

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Issue:

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Series:

Working Paper No. 1992/102
Stock No:

WPIEA1021992
ISBN:

9781451852561
ISSN:

1018-5941

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