宏观经济政策评价问题.pdfVIP

Macroeconomic Policy Evaluation Problem: An Illustration Michal Kvasnička Abstract Macroeconomic policy is often evaluated solely on the basis of empirical evidences, such as the behavior of macroaggregates. This paper argues that this approach is too shortcoming: many unobservable values are often as important as the observable ones, and may not be correlated with the observable ones. Thus the sole exploration of macroaggregates is not sufficient to evaluate the macroeconomic policy—the axiomatic economic theory must be used as well. 1. Introduction Macroeconomic policy, especially the monetary and fiscal one, is often evaluated solely on the basis of empirical evidence, especially macroaggregates. For example, the desirable rate of inflation is often estimated from its impact on the long run rate of the economy growth (see e. g. Král (2001)). This approach is consistent with the positivist approach to the economic science proposed e. g. by Friedman (1953). But is it really well-based in the common economic theory? This paper argues that it is not. The common economic theory evaluates any change of an agents well-being on the basis of his or her subjective utility. The key question is then: Are the observable variables (e. g. macroaggreages) always well-correlated with agents utilities? It has never been proved by any theory. This paper argues that it is often not the case. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 derives the criterion for the evaluation of a policy, Section 3 describes the reason why macroaggregates and other observable values need not to be correlated with this criterion and than Section 4 presents an illustration. 2. Social Welfare Function The standard approach to the evaluation of the macroeconomic policy is called a social