Determinants of Money Stock

The central concern of the book is to empirically examine a basic issue in monetary economics, on which the Keynesians and the Monetarists are sharply divided. The issue is whether the total supply of money (which includes both RBI notes as also commercial bank deposits) is related to the supply of RBI currency notes alone in any stable and predictable manner. The interest in the area derives from the controversy between the monetarists and the Keynesians in the West which has become quite keen since the middle of the seventies. In India the debate has never become too important except for a brief period in the late seventies, partly because the position of the RBI (and of the Govt., by implication) has never been conspicuously monetarist; academic view which is Keynesian has not come into conflict with the RBI perception. However monetary policy and management under the new economic policy of the government is going to take increasingly monetarist and supply side views, and this area of economic theory in India is becoming an important ground for debate.