Current Account Sustainability in Latin America Considering Nonlinearities

Borradores de Economia
Number: 
987
Published: 
Classification JEL: 
C32, C52, F32
Keywords: 
Human capital agglomeration, Social returns, Private returns, Externalities, Uncertainty, Fiscal policy

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María Teresa Ramírez-Giraldo, Karina Acosta, Olga Lucia Acosta Navarro, Lucia Arango-Lozano, Fernando Arias-Rodríguez, Oscar Iván Ávila-Montealegre, Oscar Reinaldo Becerra Camargo, Leonardo Bonilla-Mejía, Grey Yuliet Ceballos-Garcia, Luz Adriana Flórez, Juan Miguel Gallego-Acevedo, Luis Armando Galvis-Aponte, Luis M. García-Pulgarín, Andrés Felipe García-Suaza, Anderson Grajales, Daniela Gualtero-Briceño, Didier Hermida-Giraldo, Ana María Iregui-Bohórquez, Juliana Jaramillo-Echeverri, Karen Laguna-Ballesteros, Francisco Javier Lasso-Valderrama, Daniel Márquez, Carlos Alberto Medina-Durango, Ligia Alba Melo-Becerra, María Fernanda Meneses-González, Juan José Ospina-Tejeiro, Andrea Sofía Otero-Cortés, Daniel Parra-Amado, Juana Piñeros-Ruiz, Christian Manuel Posso-Suárez, Natalia Ramírez-Bustamante, Mario Andrés Ramos-Veloza, Jorge Leonardo Rodríguez-Arenas, Alejandro Sarasti-Sierra, Bibiana Taboada-Arango, Ana María Tribín-Uribe, Juanita Villaveces
Wilmer Martinez-Rivera, Manuel Darío Hernández-Bejarano
Carlos David Ardila-Dueñas, Joel Santiago Castellanos-Caballero, Carlos David Murcia-Bustos

We test current account sustainability based on the framework developed by Hakkio and Rush [1991] and Husted [1992] using a two-regime threshold vector error correction model. This methodology allows us to characterize short-run nonlinearities in the current account. We estimate the model for four Latin American economies: Chile, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. We find a long-run relationship between the current account components, which implies strong sustainability for Chile and Mexico and weak sustainability for Colombia and Brazil. For the first two countries, the predominant regime is associated with a current account surplus. In contrast, for Colombia and Brazil, the prevailing regime corresponds to a situation in which there is a long- run deficit. In general, the impulse response analysis shows that expenditure and income shocks have positive and significant responses in the predominant regime for both series.