Fluxos de capitais e vulnerabilidade externa: o estudo da dinâmica financeira dos investimentos diretos nos países do BRICS (2000-2019)

Abstract

Financial globalization has not been a beneficial process for all economies on the globe, even for those with “adequate initial conditions”. Developing countries, which (supposedly) would benefit the most from this movement, have become more fragile, showing an increase in their external vulnerabilities and less conditions to diversify their economies. Thus, it is understood that there is an extra dimension linked to the structural limits to growth faced by peripheral economies, which is linked to the external vulnerability of these economies to the movements of international capital flows, headed by the currency hierarchy. The institutional changes linked to financial globalization have increased financial flows with “short-term”, which can be reversed to any change in the conjuncture, and which these have been more damaging to peripheral economies. However, the notion that the capital flows in Direct Investment (FDI) also present this instability dynamic is little known and worked on, this gap that the thesis intends to contribute. Thus, the hypothesis of the present thesis is that part of the FDI constitutes volatile, speculative capital and that can be reversed to any change in the external and financial scenario, once these are also composed of financial transactions (shares, debts, stocks, etc.), and that this dynamic is more present due to the exacerbation of the current accumulation pattern, in which financial activities predominate, vis-à-vis, productive activities (financialization). The present thesis focuses on the study of the BRICS countries and in the 2000s, through: the analysis of the insertion of these countries in globalization and their regulations on foreign capital; the movement of its financial accounts in the face of international liquidity cycles and a comparative analysis of the volatility of these accounts and; the study of the financial determinants of FDI using ARDL models. The main conclusions were that the FDI for the BRICS proved to have dynamics close to those of the Portfolio Investment, for containing capital flows strongly affected by liquidity cycles and the VIX index (which captures the “degree of uncertainty” of agents), and that this financial dynamic of the FDI is increased the greater it is the level of economic (financial) openness and the more dynamic the capital market of the country in question – as was the case in Brazil and South Africa, compared to the other BRICS countries –, so that FDI are also configured as vectors pressure on the external financial vulnerability of economies.