Due to high inflation and the lack of financial instruments, the Russian economy is currently highly dollarized. The share of dollars in the total amount of cash circulating in the Russian economy constitutes about 80%. What is the degree of this currency substitution phenomenon? What are the implications of dollarization for the possibility of inflationary financing of the budget deficit and for welfare? These questions are studied by the authors using estimations obtained from the Ramsey – Lucas model, which uses two types of money in the utility function. In this paper, the authors use dynamic money in the utility function model, in which money services are produced both by domestic and foreign money balances, to empirically investigate currency substitution between Russian rubles and U.S. dollars in the Russian economy during the period 1995 to mid 2000. Data supports the hypothesis that foreign currency enters as a variable in the representative consumer's utility function. Our findings indicate considerable currency substitution: most estimates of elasticity of substitution are between 2 and 3. Based on estimated parameters, it is shown that simulated steady state seignorage revenues are close to actual ones for different inflationary periods. The effect of a change in the degree of dollarization on the seignorage/GDP ratio appears to be strong if the economy is highly dollarized. The estimates also demonstrate a sizable welfare impact of inflation and dollarization.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by EERC Research Network, Russia and CIS in its series EERC Working Paper Series with number
01-05e.
Length: 35 pages Date of creation: 12 Dec 2001 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:eer:wpalle:01-05e
Contact details of provider: Postal: EERC Research Network, Russia and CIS, 47, Nakhimovsky pr-t, suite 919, Moscow, 117418 Russia Phone: +7(095)332-4415 Fax: +1(202)478-1968 Web page: http://www.eerc.ru
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Dmitry Basovsky) The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Dmitry Basovsky to update the entry or send us the correct address..
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Alberto Giovannini & Bart Turtelboom, 1992.
"Currency Substitution,"
NBER Working Papers
4232, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)