Latin American Growth in the 21st Century: The 'Commodities Boom' That Wasn't

David Rosnick and Mark Weisbrot

CEPR Reports and Issue Briefs from Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)

Abstract: Latin America's economic growth rebound in the 2000s is often attributed to a “commodities boom,” which implies that the region’s growth was stimulated by sizable increases in the price of commodity exports. This paper looks at whether the data support such a conclusion. It finds that there is no statistically significant relationship between the increase in the terms of trade (TOT) for Latin American countries and their GDP growth. There is, however, a positive relationship between the TOT increase and an improvement in the current account balance. It may be that this allowed countries to avoid balance of payments crises or constraints.

Keywords: latin america; terms of trade; commodities boom (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E E0 F F1 F13 F17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2014-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fdg, nep-gro, nep-int, nep-lam and nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:epo:papers:2014-09

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