Passage:
For over a century, economic historians attributed the prolonged sixteenth-century European inflation known as the Price Revolution primarily to the influx of silver from the Americas. According to this monetarist view, the surge in bullion increased the circulating money supply faster than real economic output, driving up commodity prices across the continent. However, recent quantitative reassessments have challenged this singular focus by demonstrating that price increases initiated decades before American silver arrived in substantial volumes. Demographic historians contend that population recovery following the Black Death created severe structural imbalances: demand for basic foodstuffs rapidly outpaced agricultural supply, while a surplus of labor depressed real wages. This demographic pressure, rather than monetary expansion alone, catalyzed early price increases. While American silver undoubtedly exacerbated inflation during its mid-century peak, it operated on an economy already strained by structural scarcity. Consequently, contemporary scholars view the Price Revolution not as a simple monetary phenomenon, but as a complex interplay between demographic recovery and monetary expansion, with demographic factors providing the initial impulse.
Statement: The primary purpose of the passage is to argue that demographic recovery was exclusively responsible for sixteenth-century European inflation.
Answer: Answer