Zum Zusammenhang zwischen Mengen- und Preisänderungen

Abstract

On the Interrelationship Between Quantity an Price Changes – Observations on a Conspicuous Trade-off Relationship

The article deals with the phenomenon of a negative correlation between output and price level growth established empirically on the basis of the example of the USA during the past fifteen years. The first section depicts the inflation-growth trade-off in the USA in that period. The second section presents various general explanations of contrariety of inflation and output growth dynamics. Explanations alleging direct causality (post-Keynesian approach, monetaristic neoclassical approaches) are found side by side with explanations which stress third factors (such as price shocks, distribution struggles, economic policy, anticipation patterns). The third section deals with fundamental problems of such general explanations, which lie on the one hand in the assumed but non-existent stability of reduced form representations and on the other in the superposition of short and long term effects. On the whole, the various theoretical explanation patterns of a negative correlation of output and price level growth must be described as still extremely hypothetical and vague. Only exact analysis of the institutional, politico-economic peculiarities of a country within the period under consideration is capable of providing any more concrete information at all. In the fifth section of the study, the structural conditions in the USA are accordingly elaborated in a little more detail. It proves that during the period under review there was a constantly prevailing stop-and-go policy pattern, which consisted in the early combatting of inflation on the one hand and of an increase in unemployment on the other. There is much to indicate that this economic policy reaction pattern was very soon anticipated by private economic entities, especially the entrepreneurs, in making their decisions, and this, together with the economic policy stop-and-go reactions resulted in the establishment of the statistically observed, clearly negative interrelationship between inflation and output growth in the USA