The paper investigates empirically the medium-term determinants of Current Accounts, Net Foreign Asset Positions and Real Exchange Rates in Low Income Countries (LICs). The authors build a new dataset for 54 LICs over the period 1981-2005. They control for the standard determinants of external balance (demography, fiscal stance, Net foreign assets, levels of development; see for instance Chinn and Prasad (2003)) among others and add some new potentially important variables for LICs such as external financing (Foreign Aid), policy distortions (quality of insititutions, capital account restrictions and domestic financial reforms) and the role of external shocks

Coeurdacier, Nicolas

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External Performance in Low Income Countries 
By L. Christiansen, A. Prati, L. A. Ricci, S. Tokarick, and T. Tressel 
              
Comment by Nicolas Coeurdacier (London Business School and CEPR) 
 
NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics (ISOM) 2009, University of 
Chicago Press, edited by R. H. Clarida and F. Giavazzi, 
 
 
What is it about? 
 
The paper investigates empirically the medium-term determinants of Current 
Accounts, Net Foreign Asset Positions and Real Exchange Rates in Low Income 
Countries (LICs). The authors build a new dataset for 54 LICs over the period 1981-
2005. They control for the standard determinants of external balance (demography, 
fiscal stance, Net foreign assets, levels of development; see for instance Chinn and 
Prasad (2003)) among others and add some new potentially important variables for 
LICs such as external financing (Foreign Aid), policy distortions (quality of insititutions, 
capital account restrictions and domestic financial reforms) and the role of external 
shocks. 
 
Since exchange rate and current account adjustments can be very disruptive in LICs, 
we definitely need to understand better how these variables are determined in the 
first place to be able to better prevent such events. One can draw from such results 
important policy implications for foreign aid policies, capital account and trade 
restrictions. 
 
What are the main results?  
 
I will put the emphasis of my discussion on the results regarding the determinants of 
current accounts. I will not comment the results on the determination of real 
exchange rate or net foreign asset positions. Indeed, real exchange rates and current 
accounts are simultaneously determined.  Any worsening (resp. improvement) of the 
current account should go with an appreciation (resp. depreciation) of the RER. This 
is what the authors are finding for most variables when significant. Similarly, the 
results regarding net foreign asset positions are globally consistent with the results 
on current accounts. Variables that affect positively the current account also affect 
positively the net foreign asset position.  
 
I will focus on variables that are more specific to LICs and have not been explored in 
previous literature since the authors mostly confirm previous studies for standard 
control variables (demography, fiscal stance, levels of development).   
In particular, the authors find that: 
1. Higher levels of Foreign Aid/Concessional Loans worsen the current account. 
2. Domestic financial Liberalization and Capital Account Liberalization improve 
the current account. 
3. Natural Disasters lead to a current account deficit if the capital account is 
opened. 
 
These effects are quantitatively significant. The third result is not very surprising and 
in line with standard consumption smoothing theory: LICs borrow in international 
markets when facing an adverse shock. I will focus on the first two which are more 
challenging theoretically. Let us start with their first result.  
 
 
Possible theoretical interpretations 
 
The role of Foreign Aid 
The authors find that Foreign Aid worsens the current account of LICs and this is 
mostly driven by concessional loans. Before tackling the issue from a theoretical 
perspective, I want to raise some empirical issues: there are some endogeneity 
issues that are hard to deal with. Indeed, foreign aid is not randomly assigned and 
targeted towards the country which the most needs it. In particular, in periods of large 
current account deficits, LICs should receive more aid; this can bias their estimates 
downwards, even though the authors control for various key variables (such as levels 
of development, domestic financial development…). 
To better make sense of their result, suppose a small open economy with decreasing 
marginal productivity of capital (MPK) and an exogenous world real interest rate r 
(see figure 1).  
 
 
Figure 1: The neoclassical model of a small open economy 


 
If the country is well integrated to financial markets and the MPK equalizes the world 
interest rate, the standard Intertemporal Approach of the current account would 
predict an improvement in the current account as the aid proceeds should be saved 
(at least partly) abroad rather than invested domestically. The authors get the 
opposite. While this is not that surprising that the standard neoclassical model does 
not fit the LICs, what are the possible alternatives?  
 
I believe the authors should have tried to investigate the following interpretations of 
their result. In presence of financial repression and capital movement restrictions in 
LICs, it is likely that a wedge exists between the domestic MPK and the world interest 
rates as capital is scarce in LICs. In such a case, a one dollar increase in Foreign Aid 
would be invested domestically as it relaxes the constraint on capital. The current 
account deteriorates today (and in the future due to the interest payments). This 
seems more in line with the author’s findings and it would have been nice to test 
whether the current account of LICs that are more financially repressed react 
differently to aid proceeds.   
 
Another interpretation of their results rely on the work of Kraay and Ventura (2000): in 
presence of uncertainty and weak diminishing returns to capital, the Intertemporal 
Approach must be modified: positive income shocks (such as aid flows) should be 
invested at the margin in the same proportion as overall wealth. In other words, 
debtor countries such as LICs should run larger current account deficits following a 
positive transitory income shocks. 
 
Policy distortions 
The authors find that capital account liberalization and domestic financial reforms 
improves the current account of LICs. Their interpretation is that better functioning 
capital markets boost savings more than investment. This might be true for domestic 
financial reforms but this seems a very counter-intuitive result regarding capital 
account liberalization. Indeed, in line with previous arguments, one should expect 
LICs to be credit constrained. Alleviating these constraints by opening up to capital 
markets should boost domestic investment until the domestic MPK equalizes the 
world interest rate. LICs should then finance investment by foreign borrowing and 
one should observe a deterioration of the current account.  
 
Obviously, the opposite can occur if the domestic interest rate is below the world 
interest rate before capital market integration (see figure 2). The authors provide 
some evidence that this is indeed the case for half of the countries for which they 
have data on real deposit rates (see table A3). In that case, one could indeed expect 
capital flight once the country opens up to capital flows (from K0 to K1). This result 
would echo the findings of Gourinchas and Jeanne (2009) who argues that LICs are 
exporting capital.  
 
 
Figure 2: Capital account liberalization in a small open economy with a domestic real 
interest () below the world interest rate (r).
Capital 
flight 




K1                  K0   
Martin and Rey (2006) also have such predictions: capital account liberalization in 
very poor countries lead to capital flight due to market size effects: when poor 
countries open up to capital markets, they seek for a diversified set of assets in the 
rest of the world as they do not provide enough assets locally. Interestingly the 
authors find opposite effects for higher income countries and Martin and Rey (2006) 
would predict such a threshold.  
 
An alternative story that could be tested empirically is provided by Jin (2009): in a two 
good/two factors Hecksher-Ohlin type of model, poorer countries should specialize in 
labour intensive sectors. Capital account liberalization induces two effects: capital 
inflows towards the poorer country [neoclassical effect] as well as capital outflows 
[composition effect driven by specialization] as capital demanding industries are in 
the North. Potentially the composition effect can dominate, especially for countries 
like LICs that are far apart in terms of factor endowments from industrialized 
countries. 
 
The surprising impact of capital account liberalization is confirmed when comparing 
LICs to high income countries: while capital account liberalization generates capital 
outflows from LICs, it generates capital inflows towards high income countries and 
emerging markets. This is worse than the ‘Lucas puzzle’! However, I would argue 
that this result is partly driven by sample selection. Lane and Milesi-Feretti (2002) 
shows that among developing countries, the high incomes ones tend to receive more 
capital inflows but among developed markets (OECD), the high income ones export 
more capital. This would suggest that capital account liberalization leads to capital 
outflows in LICs and developed markets but capital inflows towards middle-income 
countries. Such a hypothesis could be tested in future work. 
 
 
Conclusion 
 
The paper offers interesting insights on the main determinants of external variables 
(current account, net foreign asset position and real exchange rate) for LICs. Some 
of their results go against conventional wisdom. In particular, the results regarding 
the impact of foreign aid and policy distortions (financial repression and capital 
account restrictions) on the external balance are the most puzzling and further work 
would be needed to discriminate among the different possible channels that can 
explain those results.  
 
 
References 
 
Lane, P. and Milesi-Feretti, G.M, 2002, Long-term capital movements, NBER 
Macroeconomics Annual 16, 73-116, 2002. 
Jin, K., 2009, Industrial structure and financial capital flows, mimeo Harvard 
Martin, P. and Rey, H., 2006, Globalization and emerging markets: with or without a 
crash, American Economic Review, vol. 96, 15, 1631-1651. 
Kraay, J. and Ventura, J., 2000, Current account in debtor and creditor countries, 
Quarterly Journal of Economics. 
Gourinchas, P-O and Jeanne, O., 2009, Capital Flows to developing countries: the 
allocation puzzle, mimeo University of California Berkeley 
Chinn, M. and Prasad, E., 2003, Medium determinants of current accounts in 
industrial and developing countries: an empirical exploration, Journal of International 
Economics, 59(1), 47-76. 


Comment on 'External performance in low income countries' (by  L. Christiansen, A. Prati, L. A. Ricci, S. Tokarick, and T. Tressel)

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Comment on 'External performance in low income countries' (by L. Christiansen, A. Prati, L. A. Ricci, S. Tokarick, and T. Tressel)

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Comment on 'External performance in low income countries' (by L. Christiansen, A. Prati, L. A. Ricci, S. Tokarick, and T. Tressel)

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