Autonomous demand and economic growth: some empirical evidence

Daniele Girardi and Riccardo Pariboni

No CSWP13, Centro Sraffa Working Papers from Centro di Ricerche e Documentazione "Piero Sraffa"

Abstract: According to the Sraffian supermultiplier model, economic growth is driven by autonomous demand (exports, public spending and autonomous consumption). This paper tests empirically some major implications of the model. For this purpose, we calculate time-series of the autonomous components of aggregate demand and of the supermultiplier for the US, France, Germany, Italy and Spain and describe their patterns in recent decades. Changes in output and in autonomous demand are tightly correlated, both in the long and in the short-run. The supermultiplier is substantially higher and more stable in the US, while in the European countries it is lower and decreasing. Where the supermultiplier is reasonably stable - i.e., in the US since the 1960s - autonomous demand and output share a common long-run trend (i.e, they are cointegrated). The estimation of a Vector Error-Correction model (VECM) on US data suggests that autonomous demand exerts a long-run effect on GDP, but also that there is simultaneous causality between the two variables. We then estimate the multiplier of autono-mous spending through a panel instrumental-variables approach, finding that a one dollar increase in autonomous demand raises output by 1.6 dollars over four years. A further implication of the model that we test against em-pirical evidence is that increases in autonomous demand growth tend to be followed by increases in the invest-ment share. We find that this is the case in all five countries. An additional 1% increase in autonomous demand raises the investment share by 0.57 percentage points of GDP in the long-run.

Keywords: Growth; Effective Demand; Supermultiplier (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B51 E11 E12 O41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2015-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.centrosraffa.org/public/4a625260-55f1-4d26-bcfe-1c7f75e36301.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:sraffa:0013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Centro Sraffa Working Papers from Centro di Ricerche e Documentazione "Piero Sraffa" Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Saverio M. Fratini ().