 Testing for the Sustainability of the Current Account Deficit in Four Industrial Countries: A RevisitationShyh-Wei Chen ()
Economics Bulletin, 2010, vol. 30, issue 2, 1474-1495 Abstract: In this article we re-examine the mean-reverting property of the current account for the US, the UK, Canada and France. This is important because a current account that is not a stationary process implies that the external debts are unsustainable. The empirical results show that the current account-GDP ratios for the four countries are non-stationary processes based on the traditional unit root test. Bierens' non-linear unit root test results show that these current account-GDP ratios could exhibit mean stationarity, trend stationarity and non-linear trend stationarity once we account for a more general specification of the non-linear deterministic components based on a Chebishev polynomials approximation. One should, therefore, be cautious when concluding that the current account is sustainable or unsustainable based upon the traditional unit root test since it overlooks the non-linear property intrinsic in the data. Keywords: Current account; sustainability; unit root; non-linearity (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-09-00313 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Economics Bulletin from AccessEcon |
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