Growth and Macroeconomic Fluctuations: The Case of Latin America

Based on time-series from 1960 to 1995, we show the existence –for Latin American countries– of a short and long run negative correlation between economic growth and uncertainty. The probable cause of such relationship is time-variant; it is only after 1990 that investment-based theories on the link between uncertainty and growth cannot be rejected by the data. Further, the data cannot support the claim that government expenditure explains the correlation between growth and uncertainty. Our results suggest that the average growth rate is endogenous to policy innovations. This implies that the long-run depends on short-run movements in activity, thereby casting some doubts on the conventional wisdom that assumes the dichotomy between an invariant steady state path and fluctuations around it.

Goverment policy multiplier, inflation and financial intermediation: Testing the New Keynesian theory

In a recent issue of the American Economic Review, several authors presented their views regarding what they believe constitute the core of macroeconomics. All of these authors agree that there is a short-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment. Yet there is a lack of consensus as for why this happens. The purpose of this paper is to test the validity of one of these possible explanations: the new Keynesian theory. For this purpose, we use evidence from 18 countries for the period 1964-1996, on the relation between inflation, output supply elasticity and government-policy multipliers. Empirical evidence seems to support the proposition derived from the new Keynesian school: the value of the fiscal multiplier will be smaller as the average inflation increases and the degree of financial intermediation declines. One consequence of this result is that the effectiveness of government expenditure as a mean to stabilize output depends to a large extent on the soundness of the domestic banking system.

The Impact of Infrastructure on Mexican Manufacturing Growth

This paper analyses the impact of infrastructure on the growth rate of the Mexican manufacturing sector. For such purpose, two measures of infrastructure are used: highways and electricity. Further, we also estimate the degree of returns to scale and the markup. We pooled two digit industries to obtain the estimates of the whole manufacturing sector. For the entire manufacturing sector, our results do not show evidence of increasing returns but the existence of market power cannot be rejected. We find that both types of public infrastructure have a significant effect on manufacturing growth and its inclusion reduces the estimated values of returns to scale and market power. Once we use sectoral data, we obtain mixed results: public infrastructure affects significantly only some sectors.