Termos de troca, preço das commodities e o crescimento brasileiro : uma análise sob o prisma da restrição externa

This study aims to investigate the relationship between terms of trade and the long-term growth of Brazilian economy, from the perspective of external constraint, between the period 1994 to 2014. For this purpose, it is based on Thirlwall's (1979) original contribution, in order to empirically test the terms of trade contribution for determining the Brazilian growth potential product equivalent with Balance of Payments equilibriun. Using cointegration method, which seeks to analyze the long-term relationship between the variables, and subdividing the period into two sub-periods, 1994-2004 and 2004-2014, we estimate and compare real and hypothetical income elasticities and predicted and observed growth rates, with and without the terms of trade, for each period. The obteined results show that the inclusion of terms of trade in the empirical procedure to test the validity of Thirlwall's Law lead to higher growth rates obtained by the model (hypothetical), for the entire period 1994-2014 and for the sub-period 2004 -2014. This "theoretical" relaxation of the external constraint, caused by the inclusion of the terms of trade in traditional Thirlwall's rule, overestimated the average real growth rate for these periods, while the traditional Thirlwall's Law - without terms of trade - has adapted better to the real behavior of Brazilian economy. Thus, despite having contributed potentially for the relaxation of external constraint on Brazilian growth, the effect of terms of trade may have been offset by the negative performance of other Balance of Payments components, as capital flows and interest, profits and dividends payments abroad.