Foreign Savings, Vulnerability, And Exchange Crisis: The Cases Of Mexico, Brazil, And Argentina

The aim of this work is to identify if there was some link between the use of foreign savings and the deterioration of indicators of external vulnerability in the period preceding the exchange crises in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, which occurred between 1994 and 2001. For that, one needs to provide a brief theoretical discussion on the issue of external vulnerability and the ways to measure it, in order to establish the possible relations between this and the use of foreign savings. Among the methodological procedures needed to de-velop this work, let us first point out the gathering of data from the countries analyzed; these data are: national accounts, net foreign debt, short-term exter-nal debt, external debt service, exports of goods and services, international reserves, and GDP, which were obtained from international organizations su-ch as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These data allo-wed us to calculate different indicators of vulnerability, as the ratios external debt/exports, reserves/foreign debt, the debt service/exports, and the debt ser-vice/GDP, in order to make a comparative analysis of the economies involved. It is important to highlight that the economies analyzed had in common the indiscriminate use of foreign savings in the periods that preceded their respec-tive crises. However, the economic growth of the countries in that period was negligible when compared to the average growth of the emerging economies. The study shows it is due to the fact that these countries did not direct the bulk of capital raised abroad to the productive sector, as evidenced by the low proportion of gross fixed capital formation in relation to GDP in that period. The data analyzed also reveal a deterioration of indicators of external vulnera-bility in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. The paper concludes that this deterio-ration is associated to the way of using foreign savings, since they replaced the domestic savings instead of complementing them.