تورم و توسعه مالی؛ شواهدی از برزیل

We examine the impact of inflation on financial development in Brazil, and the data available permit us to cover the period between 1985 and 2004. The results—based initially on time series and then on panel time series and panel data and analyses—suggest that inflation presented deleterious effects on financial development during the period investigated here. The main implication of the results is that poor macroeconomic performance has detrimental effects to financial development, a variable that is important for affecting, (e.g., economic growth and income inequality). Therefore, low and stable inflation, and all that it encompasses, is a necessary first step to achieve a deeper and more active financial sector with all its attached benefits.

We investigate the role of inflation for financial development in Brazil using data covering the period between 1985 and 2004 and ten economically diverse regions. This period is particularly interesting because it captures two distinct regimes in terms of macroeconomic performance in Brazil. On the one hand, the period between 1985 and 1994 covers the time when the rates of inflation were notoriously high, reaching an astounding 82.18 percent per month in March 1990. On the other hand, from 1995 onwards, the macroeconomic performance has consistently improved, with inflation presenting relatively much lower and stable rates since then. 1

We have examined the relationship between inflation and financial development in Brazil from 1985 to 2004. The results—based on different data sets, and on a range of estimators and financial development measures—suggest that inflation reduced financial development in Brazil at the time. The relevance of understanding the macroeconomic determinants of financial development lies in the fact that a deeper and more active financial sector is of crucial importance for key economic variables—i.e., economic growth and income inequality—high in the agenda of any developing country, in particular Brazil. Moreover, given the sort of macroeconomic performance seen at the time of transition from dictatorship to democracy in Brazil, inflation arises naturally as a proxy for macroeconomic performance and, hence, as a factor that is to have an impact on financial development.