Natural interest rate: Assessing the stance of India’s monetary policy under uncertainty

Abstract

The constant natural interest rate assumption implicit in Taylor type feedback rules to assess the stance of monetary policy could be misleading at times, particularly because of the time-varying nature of the natural interest rate. In the post crisis period, reflecting a complex web of supply side, demand side, regulatory and global factors, natural rates of both advanced and emerging economies have been estimated in the literature to have altered considerably. Using a theoretical framework that combines the essence of Ramsay’s growth model and the New-Keynesian macro-dynamics, and applying the Kalman filter estimation technique, this paper finds that India’s estimated natural real interest rate in Q4 of 2014–2015 lied in a range of 0.6%–3.1%, even though core estimates point to a narrower range of 1.6%–1.8%. These estimates indicate that the real interest rate gap was negative in India for a major part of the last about ten years when CPI inflation was persistently high, implying that monetary policy stance of the Reserve Bank was largely accommodative rather than anti-inflationary.