Essays on Monetary-Fiscal Interactions in Emerging Market and Developing Economies

Abstract

This thesis contains three chapters on monetary-fiscal interactions in Emerging Market and Developing Economies. Governments in emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) frequently intervene in agricultural markets to stabilize food prices following adverse shocks. These interventions often take the form of large-scale food procurement and redistribution, which we define as a redistributive policy shock. This chapter examines the effects of such shocks on inflation and the distribution of consumption between rich and poor households. We develop a tractable two-sector, two-agent New Keynesian DSGE model and estimate its parameters for the Indian economy using Bayesian methods. Our findings reveal that under an inflation-targeting regime, consumer heterogeneity plays a crucial role in determining whether monetary policy responses to various shocks enhance or reduce aggregate welfare. The second chapter evaluates the welfare implications of redistributive policy shocks under alternative monetary policy regimes. Building on Chapter 1, which finds that redistributive policy shocks are inflationary and expansionary in terms of aggregate output, we assess how different monetary responses alter welfare outcomes. Following Schmitt-Grohe Uribe (2007), we compute consumptionequivalent welfare gains to compare the welfare cost of these shocks under the optimised simple monetary rule and the planner’s solution (Ramsey Optimal Monetary Policy). The optimal rule features no interest rate smoothing, a strong response to inflation, and a limited reaction to output. Our findings demonstrate the critical role of monetary policy in shaping the welfare impact of redistributive shocks. We further compare these welfare effects to those of an agricultural productivity shock and show that the steady-state level of redistribution significantly affects the relative costs of redistribution-driven fluctuations. We find that non-optimised rules lead to significantly higher welfare costs than optimised simple rules. In the third chapter, we study the interactions between informality, underdeveloped financial markets and fiscal consolidation by developing a two-sector, twoagent medium-scale NK-DSGE model that allows public expenditure and private consumption to be either substitutes or complements. While there is a large literature that tries to understand the effects of fiscal consolidation in AEs, there is a relatively small literature on fiscal consolidation in EMDEs. We find that greater informality dampens the reduction in public debt from a contractionary fiscal policy shock. We find tax-based shocks to exhibit greater decline in debt at the cost of a greater contraction in output than spending-based shocks. Our analysis suggests that a fiscal consolidation shock can be expansionary when private consumption and public spending exhibit moderately-high substitutability consistent with the literature on expansionary fiscal consolidations.