Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p> Economic inflation is traditionally interpreted as a monetary phenomenon resulting from the interaction between money supply and aggregate demand. However, existing approaches rarely provide a unified framework linking monetary expansion, real production, financial valuation, and environmental constraints. This study proposes a physically grounded framework that integrates thermodynamics, information theory, and macroeconomic dynamics to reinterpret inflation as the imbalance between financial expansion and real productive capacity. Economic value is decomposed into material and informational components, and a dimensionless parameter relating financial valuation to market production is introduced. Based on this parameter, four inflation moments (H <sub>t</sub> , K <sub>t</sub> , G <sub>t</sub> , F <sub>t</sub> ) are derived from the monetary aggregates M0, M1, M2, and M3, each normalized by GDP. The framework is evaluated using annual data from 1995 to 2025 for advanced economies (Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Japan, and the United States), BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), and high-inflation economies represented by Argentina and Venezuela. In most cases, observed inflation remains within or near the interval defined by the four reconstructed inflation moments, while the indices consistently reflect the effects of major macroeconomic events, including the introduction of the euro, the 2008 global financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, energy-price shocks, and episodes of severe monetary instability. The framework successfully describes inflation across stable, inflationary, and hyperinflationary environments. China and Japan represent structural exceptions in which institutional and macroeconomic factors moderate the transmission of monetary expansion to consumer prices. Overall, the proposed inflation moments provide robust, physically interpretable indicators that unify monetary dynamics, financial markets, and real production, offering a new perspective for analyzing inflation across diverse economic regimes. </p>