An Operational Framework for Inflation Targeting in Egypt

The thesis focuses on the potential adoption of the inflation targeting (IT) regime in Egypt. Basically, it aimed at answering the following questions. (1) Should the central bank of Egypt shift to IT or continue with the current monetary policy framework, monetary aggregate targeting (MAT). (2) What the optimal policy horizon (OPH) should central bank choose to target inflation, (3) Does modelling inflation using models that allow for time-varying conditional variance, skewness and kurtosis helps in better understanding of inflation uncertainty? The main results of the thesis show that: (1) To answer the first question, the stability of velocity of money in circulation and money multiplier has been analysed using variance ratio tests and found unstable. Therefore, we could conclude that the current MAT framework cannot achieve its ultimate goal of price stability and it is believed that shifting to IT framework is highly recommended. (2) Concerning the OPH, the results show that the OPH is largely dependent on the nature of the shock and on a central bank’s preferences over goals. Thus, for different kinds of the shocks, even if they are generally classified of the same type, the concern of the central bank about other policy objectives affects the policy horizon. With respect to shock persistence, the results demonstrate that the horizon increases with the persistence of the shock as persistent shock distributed over many period in comparison with transitory and less persistent shocks. (3) To answer the third question, the methodology proposed by Leon, Rubio, and Serna (2005) for modelling nonconstant conditional second, third and fourth moments is applied. The results indicate that models with nonconstant second, third and fourth moments are superior to models with time invariant volatility, skewness and kurtosis.