 Composition and growth effects of the current account: a synthesized portfolio viewKai Guo and Keyu Jin LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library Abstract: This paper analyzes a useful accounting framework that breaks down the current account to two components: a composition effect and a growth effect. We show that past empirical evidence, which strongly supports the growth-eect as the main driver of current account dynamics, is mis- conceived. The remarkable empirical success of the growth eect is driven by the dominance of the cross-sectional variation, which, under conditions met by the data, is generated by an accounting approximation. In contrast to previous ndings that the portfolio share of net foreign assets to total assets is constant in a country, both our theoretical and empirical results support a highly persistent process or a unit root process, with some countries displaying a trend. Finally, we reestablish the composition effect as the quantitatively dominant driving force of current account dynamics in the past data. JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Journal of International Economics, September, 2009, 79(1), pp. 31-41. ISSN: 0022-1996 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:25826 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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