Separating Monetary and Structural Causes of Inflation

Abstract

The paper employs a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) to model inflation so as to identify the relative importance of shocks to real output growth, monetary growth and exchange rate depreciation in inflation dynamics in developing countries using data from Ghana. The results show that either monetary growth or structural factors alone do not explain the inflation experience and that the structural factors dominate monetary growth in the inflation dynamics. There is a fairly strong feedback between inflation and exchange rate depreciation both of which have weak relationship with monetary growth. These suggest that policies that boost domestic supply and therefore reduce import demand will be more potent than direct monetary management to curb inflation in Ghana.