Crescimento econômico, câmbio real, restrição externa e endogeneidade das elasticidades renda

Abstract

Considering the remarkable durability of the Balance of Payments Constrained Growth Models, especially the particular case of Thirlwall's Law, which defines sustainable growth of a country is determined by an equation that keep the balance of payments in equilibrium, this work is dedicated to investigate the hypothesis of relevance of the real exchange rate and the endogeneity of income elasticities for this type of models. The effort has been made to produce something that improve the debate on the importance of the real exchange rate to economic growth, and the possibility of income elasticities are endogenous. The basic hypothesis is that maintaining a competitive real exchange rate level can have effects that transcend the adjustment of aggregate demand in the short term by changing the elasticities in order to modify the long-term relationship between the rate of growth of domestic product and the rate growth of the world economy. On the one hand, the motivations of this work emerged a "new " literature of real exchange rate and economic growth, where the highlights are the authors of the fallacy of composition (including, Blecker and Razmi, 2010; Razmi, 2007; Razin and Collins, 1997) and the authors have found empirical evidence of the relationship between real exchange rate and economic growth, among these, Rodrik (2007), Eichengreen, (2007), (Gala, 2008), Sampaio and Gala (2008), Silveira (2011), among others. On the other hand, resurge the debate on the endogeneity of income elasticities in Thirlwall's model, highlighting the work of Ferrari, Freitas and Barbosa-Filho (2010) and Missio and Jayme Jr. (2012). Thus, the objectives of this study were to investigate both the importance of the real exchange rate in models à la Thirlwall and the endogeneity of the ratio between the income elasticities. This study finds evidence that the ratio of the elasticities is indeed exogenous, and that the real exchange rate can influence economic growth only by determining the ratio of elasticities, i.e, the real exchange rate is important for improving non-price competitiveness, but is not significant in determining trade via price competition.