O modelo hiperinflacionário da demanda por moeda de Cagan e o caso do Brasil

Abstract

We first compare some of today's monetary characterists of Brazil with those of both the classic European hyperinflationary cases of the early 1920's and the less known Taiwan's case of quasi-hyperinflation between 1945 and 1949; the latter due mainly to some similarity with the Brazilian case. Then we tested Cagan's hyperinflationary demand for money model with monthly data for Brazil starting in 1980, and considering distinct periods. Such a test consists basically in checking whether or not the variables real money balances and the inflation rate cointegrate. We concluded that Cagan's model could not be rejected for most periods, thus enabling a superconsistent estimate of the parameter of interest in Cagan's model. In such cases we calculated the inflation rate which maximizes the inflation tax revenue, then comparing it with the observed inflation rate. We concluded that these two rates were in general statistically distinct, with the observed inflation rate being the larger of the two, as it actually happened in the classic hyperinflationary cases analyzed by Cagan (1956).