Valuation Effects on the Business Cycle in Emerging Markets: Net Capital Flows and Real Exchange Rate Depreciation Effects on Growth and Capital Accumulation

In the aftermath of the recent financial crises in emerging markets, contrary to the conventional literature and the experience of advanced countries, real depreciation proved to have adverse effects on growth and investment. A growing literature analysing the nature of these events has focused on the role of balance sheet effects to explain the contractionary impact of depreciation in economies with liquidity constraints. This book, therefore, examines empirically the relationships between net capital flows, real exchange rates, economic growth and capital accumulation in a panel of 20 emerging economies from 1985 to 2004. A panel of 13 developed countries is used for comparative purposes. As an original contribution of this research, a constructed debt-weighted real effective exchange rate is used to focus on the rate in which liabilities tend to be denominated in emerging countries. The analysis should help shed some light on why, real depreciation proves to be contractionary in emerging markets through valuation effects, and should be especially useful to anyone analyzing the characteristic features of those economies.