Book Description

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the impact of globalization on the dynamics of inflation and monetary policy in a globalized world. It consists of three essays.In the first essay we investigate the impact of financial globalization on the behaviour of inflation targeting emerging market economies with respect to exchange rate - Do central banks respond to exchange rate movements or not? We use quarterly data for six emerging market inflation targeting economies from the date of their inflation targeting adoption to 2009 Q4. The chapter uses small open economy new Keynesian model à la Gali and Monacelli (2005), and employs multi-equation GMM technique to investigate the relationship. We find that the response of central bank to the exchange rate in case of Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Thailand is statistically significant while insignificant for Korea and Czech Republic. Theoretically, it should not be so as even under flexible inflation targeting central bank responds to inflation deviation and output gap; we think that the peculiar characteristics of emerging markets, like fear of floating, weak financial system and low level of central bank credibility make exchange rate important for these economies. In the second essay we investigate empirically the relative importance of monetary transmission channels for Brazil, Chile and Korea. This chapter uses monthly data from the inception of inflation targeting regime to 2009 M12. We use a SVAR model incorporating the main monetary transmission channels combined together instead of individual channels in isolation. The empirical results indicate that the exchange rate channel and the share price channel have higher relative importance than the traditional interest rate and credit channel for industrial production. The results are not much different in case of inflation, except for Korea. The high ranking of exchange rate and share price channel is in line with the results by Gudmundsson (2007), which finds that exchange rate channel might have overburdened in the wake of financial globalization.In the third chapter we investigate empirically the role of openness - real and financial - on the inflation dynamics of Brazil, Chile and Korea. The chapter uses monthly data from the inception of inflation targeting regime to the end month of 2009. In this chapter we employ the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) technique. We use imports to GDP ratio as an indicator for real openness whereas Chinn and Ito index (KAOPEN) and total assets plus total liabilities to GDP ratio form the data set of Lane and Milesi-Ferretti are two proxies for financial openness. The chapter concludes that there exists, generally, a positive relationship between real openness and inflation. However, in case of financial globalization the results are inconclusive as they are sensitive to measurement method of financial globalization.