Latin America's Nonlinear Monetary Response to Pandemic Inflation

ABSTRACT

This paper estimates empirical Taylor rules to analyze the recent monetary policy of the five main Latin American inflation‐targeting central banks. We find that during the inflationary surge of 2021–2023, monetary policy reacted more strongly and more quickly to changes in inflation than predicted by a standard linear Taylor rule, estimated on data from the prepandemic period. Although this appears to represent a shift in the monetary reaction function, we think it more likely that Latin American central banks have been following a nonlinear strategy, responding more aggressively to inflation, the higher it rose. We confirmed this by adding the square of inflation to the Taylor rule model: its coefficient was positive and significant, indicating that policy interest rates exhibited a nonlinear response to inflation, even during the prepandemic period, and the model did a better job of predicting the sharp rise in interest rates during 2021–2023.