Productivity, investment and capital flow: the failure of growth with foreign savings in Brazil

ABSTRACT This work analyzes productivity and the hypothesis that capital flow does not influence investment in the Brazilian economy. To do so, we present a productivity equation conditioned on the rates of: investments, wage costs, and external demand. The relationship between productivity and investment and wage rates suggests a possible simultaneity, given the distributive nature of aggregate income between capital and labor. Therefore, estimators that treat endogeneity in two stages are used: the Two-Stage Least Squares (MQ2E) and the Generalized Least Moments (MMG), to increase the robustness of the results. We find that the investment rate explains productivity, but capital flow does not determine productive investment. In addition, Brazilian investment is more susceptible to the parameters of marginal capital efficiency, whose fall has affected Brazilian productivity since the 1980s.

摘要 本研究围绕生产率展开分析，并检验「巴西经济中资本流动不影响投资」这一假说。为此，本文构建了以投资率、工资成本与外部需求为约束条件的生产率方程。鉴于资本与劳动间总收益的分配属性，生产率、投资与工资率之间的关联存在联立内生性的可能。因此，本文采用处理内生性的两阶段估计方法：两阶段最小二乘法（Two-Stage Least Squares，MQ2E）与广义矩估计法（Generalized Least Moments，MMG），以提升结果的稳健性。研究结果表明，投资率对生产率具有显著解释力，但资本流动并未决定生产性投资。此外，巴西投资更易受边际资本效率参数的影响，自20世纪80年代以来，边际资本效率的下滑已对巴西生产率造成冲击。