38 research outputs found

    The Golden Period For Growth In Chile: Explanations And Forecasts

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    Economic growth in Chile since the mid 1980s has been remarkable for its high level and persistence. This paper explores the factors behind the high growth rates of the past 15 years and analyzes the extent to which they can be sustained in the future. The first part of the paper presents some stylized facts about growth in Chile. Taken together, they suggest that the jump in growth was driven by policies and macroeconomic conditions that affected the economy’s overall productivity. The second part of the paper considers the large body of recent empirical growth literature to examine the extent to which a cross-country approach can explain Chile’s growth performance. It formulates a basic regression model that contains the most popular variables in the growth literature and estimates it using techniques suited for dynamic models of panel data. The basic model allows us to explain about 45% of the change in the growth rate between 1970-1985 and 1986-1998, which was 4.74 percentage points. When we expand the basic model to include the quality of the political system and governance, the comprehensiveness and complementarity of policy reforms, and the availability of public services and infrastructure, we can explain 73% of the growth improvement. The last part of the paper starts the assessment of possible new growth sources for Chile by, first, projecting the country’s growth rate for the next 10 years under various assumptions and, second, proposing some areas with potentially large returns.

    Policy Biases when the Monetary and Fiscal Authorities have Different Objectives.

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    The question that this paper examines is what policy bias there may be when monetary and fiscal authorities have different preferences regarding the importance of closing the output and inflation gaps created by adverse economic shocks. For this purpose, the paper follows a game-theoretic approach to model the interaction between monetary and fiscal authorities, each having different preferences and controlling their respective policy instrument. Modeled as a Nash or Stackelberg equilibrium, the absence of policy coordination implies that an increase in the preference divergence between both authorities leads to, ceteris paribus, larger public deficits (the fiscal authority’s policy instrument) and higher interest rates (the central bank’s instrument). The empirical section of the paper provides evidence in favor of this conclusion in a pooled sample of 19 industrial countries with annual information for the period 1970-94. The policy implication of the paper is that, without prejudice to the gains from central bank independence, institutional arrangements that allow for monetary-fiscal coordination may alleviate the biases that move the economy to sub-optimally higher fiscal deficits and real interest rates.
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