Authors
Rodrigo Pérez Artica, Joel Rabinovich
Publication date
2021/5
Description
We provide an empirical assessment of capital outflows made over the last three decades by the non-financial private sector in six large Latin American economies: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Whereas considerable attention has been recently devoted to corporate capital inflows to emerging market countries, the accumulation of foreign assets made by the non-financial private sector in these countries has gone mostly overlooked. We show that these outflows are quantitatively relevant, outweighing those made by banks. Moreover, although there are noticeable differences across countries, we find that in general these outflows are:(i) highly correlated with the global financial cycle;(ii) positively related to capital inflows and the balance of payments’ current account balance, implying that they grow with higher foreign exchange availability;(iii) seemingly not affected by changes in domestic assets’ risk and capital controls.