Desequilíbrios globais: uma investigação empírica sobre o comportamento das transações correntes (1980 a 2012)

Abstract

The doctorate thesis has the central goal to analyze the current account for a broad set of countries focused in a perspective associated to the global disequilibrium literature, which has raised new concerns and developments since the international financial crisis of 2008. The first chapter develops a historical review on the evolution of the international financial system emphasizing the comparative analysis of the main characteristics of this system in the Bretton Woods period and more recently, it evaluates the validation or not of the hypothesis of the occurrence of what is called Bretton Woods II, that argues the emergency of a new periphery composed by economies with very distinct characteristics reflecting the financial world instability, by the presence of major current account disequilibrium involving considerably number of economies. The argument opposing to Bretton Woods II is that the world is moving towards a financial system with flexible exchange rates since fixed exchange rate regimes imposes high costs to policy makers, requiring higher capital mobility and limiting the efficiency of monetary policy instruments. Other than this, the recent international financial crisis has raised doubts on the Dollar ability to transport value over time since it is the currency used for international transactions and in this context emerges the possibility of a smooth transition towards a shared leadership on the international financial system with the Renminbi and the Euro. The second chapter aims to develop an empirical analysis based on the estimation of thirteen vector autoregressive models (VAR) for a set of selected economies (advanced and emerging / developing). The variance decomposition analysis (VDA) and the impulse response function (IRF) reveals that the investment rate, the real effective exchange rate, the consumption rate and the capital flows (FDI) are the most import variables to understand the current account. The third and last chapter seeks to investigate the current account for a set of seventy-two countries using panel data analysis to estimate fixed / random effect (static) and difference and system GMM (dynamic) models for the period of 1980 to 2012. The empirical evidences corroborates the main results from chapter two. The investment rate is statistically significant in 23 of the 27 estimated models; the consumption rate is significant in 17 out of 27 models while the net inflows of foreign direct investment is significant in 10 of the 18 estimated models. The real effective exchange rate does not have statistically significant coefficients for the System GMM estimated models and considering the entire set of estimation there is statistically significance in only 8 out of the 27 estimated models.