Capital Flows, Country Risk, and Contagion

Abstract

It has been widely recognized that both country-specific and global factors matter in explaining capital flows. Fiess presents an empirical framework that disentangles the relative weight of country-specific and global factors in determining capital flows. In essence, his approach first separates the common component of emerging country spreads from their country-specific component. The pure country risk and global risk components are then used as explanatory variables to account for the observed pattern of capital flows using multivariate cointegration analyses. The author is able to identify the relative weight of global and country-specific factors in explaining capital flows to Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela in the 1990s. When further decomposing country risk into its determinants, the author finds that within a small system it is possible to jointly identify the determinants of capital flows and sovereign bond spreads. We find that capital flows are driven by country risk and global factors (contagion and U.S. long-term interest rates), while country risk is determined by the primary balance-to-GDP ratio (-) and the ratio of public debt to GDP (+). This paper - a product of the Office of the Chief Economist, Latin America and the Caribbean Region - is part of a larger effort in the region to understand international capital flows.