Financial Liberalization and Inflationary Dynamics: An Open Economy Analysis

The paper analyzes the effects of financial liberalization on inflation. We develop a monetary and endogenous growth, dynamic general equilibrium model of a small open semi-industrialized economy, with financial intermediaries subjected to obligatory "high" reserve ratio, serving as the source of financial repression. When calibrated to four Southern European semi-industrialized countries, namely Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, that typically had high reserve requirements, the model indicates a positive inflation-financial repression relationship irrespective of the the specification of preferences. But the strength of the relationship obtained from the model is found to be much smaller in size than the corresponding empirical estimates.