Should the central bank's monetary policy be closely coordinated with the government's fiscal, budgetary, social, etc. policies?
In other words, we can ask in the following way: should the government's budget policy, fiscal policy, social policy, etc. be closely coordinated with the central bank's monetary policy? During periods of economic instability, in a situation of anti-crisis and/or pro-development economic policies, in a situation of high inflation and low economic growth, is it a good solution to conduct a so-called policy mix, in which the central bank's monetary policy is tightened and, at the same time, the government's fiscal policy is eased, state budget expenditures are increased, social programs are developed as part of social policy?
During the recent economic and financial crises in many countries in the framework of anti-crisis measures and stimulating the rate of economic growth, in the framework of the monetary policy pursued, the formation of the money supply, the change of interest rates formally and/or informally cooperate with the government, which also in the framework of the anti-crisis programs undertaken, instruments for the activation of economic activity of companies and enterprises, the activation of consumption and investment carries out fiscal, social, budgetary, housing, etc. policies. If coordinated mild fiscal policy and mild monetary policy are appropriately synergistically applied within the framework of interventionist anti-crisis and pro-development measures, then stimulating the economic activity of firms and enterprises, stimulating consumption and investment development, reducing the development of the economic crisis can work more effectively. However, the scale of the applied anti-crisis and pro-development measures should be precisely adjusted to the sectoral and industry structure of the economy and the specifics of the macroeconomic processes being implemented, and thus should not lead to a significant and sustained increase in the indebtedness of the state's public finance system, too high a level of creditization of economic processes, too high levels of acceptable credit risk by commercial banks, a strong increase in inflation, a decline in the value of the national currency, a decline in the interest of foreign financial institutions in securities issued by the state treasury and capital companies of the country, etc. Unfortunately, during the SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) coronavirus pandemic, first the government in Poland applied anti-pandemic, interventionist measures, including lockdowns imposed on selected sectors of the economy thus causing a deep recession of the economy and then through further interventionist measures highly costly for the state's public finance system, financial subsidies coming from the state's public finance system limited the growth of unemployment. Another negative effect of the applied interventionist measures of the government was the rapid increase in inflation, which began as early as the 2nd quarter of 2021. This was an example of erroneously applied interventionist actions of the government on too large a scale, actions involving the application of selected instruments of state interventionism, instruments of synergistically conducted extremely mild both monetary and fiscal policies, which, as a consequence of their synergistic application, negatively affected the economic processes taking place in the Polish economy. On the other hand, some of the interventionist instruments used, due to the specially created mechanism of their operation and their high scale, may have violated the norms set forth in the Basic Law, i.e. the Constitution of the Republic of Poland. This type of interventionist measure applied on an exceptionally large scale in Poland was the purchase of Treasury bonds by the National Bank of Poland to generate additional, printed money, which was then introduced extra-budgetarily into the economy mainly in the form of non-refundable financial subsidies transferred to many companies and enterprises operating in various sectors of the economy in order to limit the growth of unemployment in a situation of deep economic crisis and economic recession generated by lockdowns. However, the government's main concern was that the unemployment rates shown by the Central Statistical Office did not change significantly despite the real decline in the level of employment, entrepreneurs changing the terms and conditions of employment of employees by, for example, reducing the duration and scale of employment of the same employees, a decline in the economic activity of companies and enterprises, a reduction in the scale of activities carried out by business entities, a reduction in the development opportunities of business entities affected by lockdowns, etc. The state interventionism thus applied during the pandemic consisted of actions and instruments of an also informally coordinated, politically politically ultra-mild monetary policy through an interventionist reduction of interest rates by the central bank and an ultra-mild fiscal policy based on the application of historically large-scale financial, non-refundable state aid. Synergistically and in a coordinated manner, the aforementioned mild monetary policy and fiscal policy applied effectively first limited the development of the economic crisis to then generate further economic problems in the economy. It is estimated that in Poland, since the 1st wave of the coronavirus pandemic, the central bank has created and transferred money to the government with a total value of almost 400 billion zlotys. On the other hand, in the framework of the economic policy unjustifiably described in the media by the government as an economic policy pursuing sustainable economic development, the opportunities that arose during the pandemic have not been used to accelerate the processes of green transformation of the economy, and this despite the fact that opportunities for this have arisen.
In view of the above, I address the following question to the esteemed community of scientists and researchers:
Should the central bank's monetary policy be closely coordinated with the government's budgetary, fiscal, social policy, etc.?
In other words, we can ask in the following way: should the government's budget policy, fiscal policy, social policy, etc. be closely coordinated with the central bank's monetary policy? In periods of economic instability, in a situation of anti-crisis and/or pro-growth economic policies, in a situation of high inflation and low economic growth, is it a good solution to conduct the so-called policy mix, in which the monetary policy conducted by the central bank is tightened and at the same time the fiscal policy conducted by the government is eased, state budget expenditures are increased, social programs are developed within the framework of social policy?
Should the central bank's monetary policy be coordinated with the government's budget policy, fiscal policy, social policy, etc.?
And what is your opinion on this topic?
What is your opinion on this issue?
Please answer,
I invite everyone to join the discussion,
Thank you very much,
Best wishes,
Dariusz Prokopowicz
The above text is entirely my own work written by me on the basis of my research.
In writing this text I did not use other sources or automatic text generation systems.
Copyright by Dariusz Prokopowicz