Andrew Coleman () (Motu Economic and Public Policy Research)
Abstract
This paper analyses the effect of inflation on the measurement of saving and housing affordability in New Zealand. When the inflation rate is positive, the income and saving of lenders is overstated and the saving of borrowers is understated because a portion of the interest earnings on capital are not true earnings but merely compensation for inflation. Because New Zealand has a large international debt position, this distortion means aggregate saving is understated, possibly by 2 percent of gross domestic product per year. In addition, a standard measure of the cost of financing the purchase of a house is overstated by approximately fifty percent, as a large part of mortgage payments are actually saving. Nevertheless, at the end of 2007 the cost of financing house purchase in New Zealand was at a cyclical high, approximately 40 percent higher than its average level since 1990.
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 Motu Economic and Public Policy Research in its series Working Papers with number
08_09.
Find related papers by JEL classification: E01 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General - - - Measurement and Data on National Income and Product Accounts and Wealth E40 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - General
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
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.: