Comment on 'External performance in low income countries' (by L. Christiansen, A. Prati, L. A. Ricci, S. Tokarick, and T. Tressel)

The paper investigates empirically the medium-term determinants of Current Accounts, Net Foreign Asset Positions and Real Exchange Rates in Low Income Countries (LICs). The authors build a new dataset for 54 LICs over the period 1981-2005. They control for the standard determinants of external balance (demography, fiscal stance, Net foreign assets, levels of development; see for instance Chinn and Prasad (2003)) among others and add some new potentially important variables for LICs such as external financing (Foreign Aid), policy distortions (quality of insititutions, capital account restrictions and domestic financial reforms) and the role of external shocks.