Chronic Inflation in an Industrializing Economy: The Brazilian Experience

Many middle income industrializing economies in Latin America are today beset by price inflation at rates close to or exceeding previous records. In this book Vincent Parkin sets out to explain the nature and causes of chronic inflation in such economies by focusing on the Brazilian experience since 1964. A theoretical model is developed to show how structural bottlenecks and cost-push pressures can lead to continuous inflation. The model, incorporating as it does stocks and flows of financial assets, forms a bridge between structuralist explanations for inflation, that have tended to abstract from money and finance, and purely monetary explanations.