Financial liberalisation and the effectiveness of monetary policy on house prices in South Africa

Abstract

This paper investigates the effectiveness of monetary policy on house prices in South Africa, before and after financial liberalisation, with financial liberalisation being identified with the recommendations of the De Kock Commission (1985). Using both impulse response and variance decomposition analysis performed on SVARs, we find that, irrespective of house sizes, during the period of financial liberalisation, interest rate shocks had relatively stronger effects on house price inflation. However, given that the size of these effects were nearly negligible, the result seems to indicate that house prices are exogenous, and, at least, are not driven by monetary policy shocks.