The Effectiveness Of Monetary Policy In South Africa Under Inflation Targeting: Evidence from a Time-Varying Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregressive Model

In the 1970s and 1980s, the economies of several developed and developing countries witnessed much volatility in output growth, inflation and other macroeconomic variables. Thereafter, these became considerably low and more stable. This latter development has been named the “great moderation” with first observation in the US and comparable evidence for other developed and developing economies including South Africa. However, the 2007/2009 economic and financial crisis resulted into heightened uncertainty and volatility. This brings to question the role of monetary policy and its effectiveness in the economy. This paper examines the transmission mechanism of shocks to monetary policy in South Africa using quarterly data from 1980:1 to 2012:4. We also in addition identify demand and supply shocks. Our analyses are based on a factor-augmented vector autoregression with time-varying coefficients and stochastic volatility (TVP-FAVAR), which allows us to simultaneously analyze the changing impulse responses of a set of 177 macroeconomic variables covering the inflation, real activity, asset prices and monetary series. We also have intangible variables, such as confidence indices, and survey variables. These data capture the broad trends in the South African economy. Our results based on the impulse response functions, are consistent with economic theory as we observe no price puzzle that is often associated with the standard VAR models. We find evidence of modest time variation in the transmission of shocks. Overall, the macroeconomic variables seemed to have responded slightly more to the monetary policy shocks in the post -2000 (inflation targeting) sub-period than the pre-2000 period, albeit the differences in the effects are statistically insignificant. The forecast error variance decomposition results show the changes in the macroeconomic variables are largely determined by the demand shock relative to the monetary policy shock although the contribution of the latter increased slightly over time. Our results suggest the need for a more efficient role of the monetary authority as this will both improve its credibility and greater economic stability. As inflation still remains within the upper portion of the 3–6% target range, appropriate mix of supply and demand side policies could be explored alongside monetary policy to reduce inflationary pressures.