Money Growth Rules in an Emerging Small Open Economy with an informal sector

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the saddle-path stability of monetary growth rules in a two-country two-sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. Alongside standard features of emerging economies, such as a combination of producer and local currency pricing for exports, fiscal dominance and oil exports, this model also incorporates informal labour and production sectors and examines how these features matter in the context of monetary policy in emerging economies. We estimate the model on Iran and US data for home and foreign block respectively using Bayesian estimation techniques. Under a benchmark instruments of monetary policy, we show that a Taylor-type money growth rule rather than interest rate, even up to a four period ahead forward-looking has complete stability and determinacy properties in the economy which is also hold regardless of the level of asset market participation, therefore the inverted Taylor principles does not apply in our economy. Our findings confirm the important propagation channels which are active in the emerging economies and taking into account these features is essential for any policy-related study, such as the stabilizer effect of terms of trade between formal and informal sector, buffer behaviour of informal sector which is dampened in the model of higher informal frictions, disturbance effects of credit constrained household on the business cycle fluctuations and finally, monetary policy shock which is less effective in an environment of high share of informal sector, low informal frictions, high share of limited asset market participations and a trade autarky economy.