infonet-economy

Intertemporal models of the current account generally assume that global shocks do not affect the current account. We use this assumption to identify global and country-specific shocks in a bivariate VAR of output and the current account. Cross-country evidence from the G7 economies suggests that this identification works surprisingly well. We then employ our method to collect stylized facts on international macroeconomic fluctuations. We find that long-term output growth is driven mainly by global factors in most G7 countries and that country-specific shocks are less persistent and generally less volatile than global shocks.