Monetary Discretion by Fiscal Means: The Case of Bulgaria

Abstract

The specific design of the Bulgarian currency board arrangement (CBA), which provides an opportunity to the Bulgarian government to conduct discretionary monetary policy by changes in the fiscal reserve, was analyzed. The impact of government deposit fluctuations on the dynamics of reserve money and interbank interest rates was investigated. The hypotheses of an automatic adjustment mechanism and a liquidity effect under the Bulgarian currency board arrangement were tested. The methodology employed was a vector autoregression, which included the following variables: MBmonetary base; BPbalance of payments; GDgovernment deposit on the balance sheet of the Issue Department of the Bulgarian National Bank; MRRminimum required reserve ratio of commercial banks. The target variable was MB. Monthly data for the period January 1998 -December 2018 were used. The study results did not provide evidence of a statistically significant impact of changes in government deposit on reserve money and interbank interest rates. The hypotheses for the existence of an automatic adjustment mechanism and a liquidity effect did not find an empirical confirmation. JEL Classification Numbers: E42, E52, E62,