Money, prices, and causality: The Chinese hyperinflation, 1946-1949, reexamined

Expanding on recent work by Tang and Hu (1983), this paper tests for the direction of causality between the money supply and inflation in the three currency areas of China during the hyperinflation of 1946 to 1949. As in the previous study, we find a feedback relationship between money and prices for the mainland China currency area. However, this relationship seems to be statistically significant only after including the post-reform period (August 1948 to May 1949) in the causality tests. For Taiwan and Manchuria, we find a strong one-way causality from inflation to money. These results confirm the widespread belief among economic historians that the Chinese hyperinflation was basically caused by the Nationalist governments' desperate attempts to finance its mounting war expenditures by printing money.