International Economics 10th Edition by Paul Krugman,Maurice Obstfeld ,Marc Melitz

Exercise 3

In the early 1980s, Brazil's government, through an average inflation rate of 147 percent per year, got only 1.0 percent of output as seigniorage, while Sierra Leone's government got 2.4 percent through an inflation rate less than a third as high as Brazil's. Can you think of differences in financial structure that might partially explain this contrast? (Hint: In Sierra Leone, the ratio of currency to nominal output averaged 7.7 percent; in Brazil, it averaged only 1.4 percent.)