Monetary Policy And Long-Term Interest Rates In South Africa

Abstract

This paper examines how short-term and long-term interest rates react to supply, demand and monetary policy shocks in South Africa. Use is made of the impulse response functions obtained from the structural vector autoregressive model with long-term restrictions. We find a positive correlation between the two interest rates after a monetary and demand shock and a negative correlation after a supply shock. The finding of this paper is that the operation of the monetary transmission mechanism should be effective in South Africa. Furthermore, this paper provides an approach to identify supply shocks in the South African business cycle.