مانده حساب جاری، توسعه مالی و موسسات: سنجش جهان "اشباع پس انداز "

We critically assess several of the key assertions underlying the global saving glut hypothesis. First, we investigate whether the behavior of the U.S. current account is anomalous in light of previous industrial country experience. Second, we determine whether East Asian current account balances are predictable using standard macroeconomic variables, augmented with institutional factors. Finally, we investigate whether higher levels of financial development in key East Asian economies would result in smaller current account surpluses. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in the budget balance would increase the current account balance by 0.10–0.49 percentage points for industrialized countries, and that the U.S. current account performance over the last four years is borderline anomalous. While more developed financial markets would lead to smaller current account balances for countries with highly developed legal systems and open financial markets, for key East Asian countries, greater financial development would cause higher saving. Asian current account surpluses seem to be driven by depressed investment, not excess saving.

The development of enormous and persistent current account imbalances over the past decade has been the topic of intense debate in academic and policy circles. The 2006 U.S. current account to GDP deficit of 6.1 percentage points is unprecedented by historical standards, and high in comparison to other developed economies. A number of explanations have been forwarded for this phenomenon. At the risk of over-simplification, the explanations can be categorized as either domestic or international in nature. Some argue that the main reason for the increase in U.S. current account imbalances is the decline in U.S. saving, especially public sector saving, since 2002. In this “twin deficits” argument, the current Administration's expansionary fiscal policy bears the greatest blame. Greenspan, 2005a, Greenspan, 2005b and Ferguson, 2004 and others have, on the other hand, argued that the impact of fiscal policy on the current account balance is small.

We have investigated the medium-term determinants of the current account using a model that controls for institutional factors with an aim to informing the recent debate over the sources of, and solutions to, the “global saving glut” that has thus far lacked empirical content. Our study addresses that gap. Given our motivation, we focused our study on the behavior of current account balances for the United States and emerging market countries in East Asia. We confirm the results obtained by Chinn and Prasad (2003) that – for the industrialized countries – budget balances play an important role in the determination of current account balances. A 1 percentage point increase in the budget balance is found to raise the current account balance by 0.15 percentage point. While smaller than the coefficient implied by some macro-models, the standard errors on the point estimate are sufficiently large so that one cannot rule out a coefficient as high as 0.40 at conventional significance levels. This result is supported by a sensitivity analysis that suggest that a 1 percentage point increase in the budget balance could lead to a 0.1–0.5 percentage point increase in the current account balances. We also find evidence for a similar effect among less developed countries. This finding is robust to inclusion of institutional variables, although the inclusion of financial factors seems to matter more – in a statistical sense – for industrialized countries than LDCs. Furthermore, we find evidence that the oft-claimed argument about the effect of financial and legal development as well as financial liberalization is only applicable to this group of countries. This finding suggests that the recommendations for financial development as a solution to the global saving glut have only a tenuous empirical basis.