Dívida pública e risco-país: um estudo acerca dos componentes não observados dessa relação / Public debt and country risk: a study about the no observable components of this relation

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2008

RESUMO

The relationship between Country-Risk and Public Debt can be expressed by the concept of Country Risk, that is, the probability of default of an economy. In other words, it intends to express the degree of confidence of the agents regarding the economic situation of a country, an important factor in assessing its propensity to default. In this context, it would be natural to expect that increases in the Debt/GDP ratio would raise the risk perception of the economy, as they signal the reduction of its capacity of payment. Nevertheless, especially among emergent countries, this relationship does not always works in the expected way, and the Brazilian case is a recent example of this situation. Most of researches on this subject concentrate in trying to explain the long run behavior of the trajectory of fiscal expenditure or constrain themselves to study the Public Debt just as a key- variable explaining the Risk term. Thus, there remains a field to be explored in this literature as it is possible to argue in favor of the presence of non-directly observable factors that impact the dynamic of both of these variables. In this sense, this work supports the hypothesis of the existence of non-observable factors external to the economic fundamentals that are able to change the risk perception of the agents, and even the context where the fiscal policies are implemented. The degree of optimism that influences the action of the economic agents is one of these non-observable factors. The objective of this dissertation is to analyze the presence of those components in the dynamics of Country-Risk and Public Debt of the Brazilian economy through the application of State Space Models and the estimation of their components by using the Kalman Filter and Smoothing recursive estimators. In the study of both Debt/GDP and Country-Risk, the results point to the presence of factors that are not integrally explained by the explanatory variables but that change the behavior of the series, mainly in moments of higher turbulence, as it happened in the incident of the attack of September 11th in 2001 or in the presidential election in Brazil in 2002. The analysis of these components offers an interesting indication about when the Brazilian economy is more vulnerable or not to the impacts of the factors external to the governmental control.

ASSUNTO(S)

international economy public debt economic policy política econômica econometria econometrics dívida pública economia internacional

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