IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/741.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Does Inequality Cause Inflation? The Political Economy of Inflation, Taxation and Government Debt

Author

Abstract

A democratic society in which the distribution of wealth is unequal elects political parties which tend to represent the interests of the poor. The clientele of such governments favour unanticipated inflation taxes to erode the real value of debt service and redistribute income from the rich to the poor. Consequently, inequality sows the seeds for inflation. Regressions confirm the empirical predictions of the model and show a strong positive relationship between the inflation rate and inequality, for a cross-section of democratic countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Beetsma, Roel & van der Ploeg, Frederick, 1992. "Does Inequality Cause Inflation? The Political Economy of Inflation, Taxation and Government Debt," CEPR Discussion Papers 741, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:741
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=741
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Cross-Country Evidence; Discretion; Distribution; Government Debt; Inflation; Median Voter; Rules; Seigniorage; Taxation; Wealth;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D3 - Microeconomics - - Distribution
    • E4 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates
    • E6 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook
    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
    • H3 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:741. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.