The lens of the quantity theory of money to disentangle the perceived relationship between money growth and inflation: a PSVAR approach

Abstract

This paper contributes to the debate on the re-appraisal of monetization mechanism as a possible tool for dealing with macroeconomic imbalances due to close economic shocks (e.g. the Covid pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the escalation in Israel-Hamas crisis). We analyze and empirically discuss the well-known Quantity Theory of Money (QTM), by applying the SVAR methodology to a heterogeneous panel including several Countries (Australia, China, India, Japan, United Kingdom and the United States) plus the block of Euro Zone (EZ) over the period 1992–2022. We investigate the dynamics and the impacts of the variables included in the theoretical model (inflation, GDP growth, money growth and the change in the velocity of money) through the analysis of the macro economic datasets retrieved from the OECD and Trading Economics databases. We find that money growth does not exert the decisive spillover effect on the path of inflation (i.e. common shock) throughout our sample. Moreover, our results indicate that the idiosyncratic component does not show a predominant and determining role of monetary growth in inflationary dynamics.