External Shocks and Sources of Macroeconomic Fluctuation: A SVEC Model based proposal for Argentina’s Economy

One of the issues of macroeconomic analysis in recent years has been trying to empirically identify the factors causing fluctuations in economic aggregates. This work investigates the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations using a structural VEC approach and quarterly data for Argentina’s economy, covering the period 1980:1-2009:1. To this effect, the paper imposes short and long run restrictions to the SVEC model, and identifies four structural shocks: term of trade, aggregate supply, aggregate demand and nominal prices. The results show that terms of trade shocks have a positive effect on real GDP, and that the main sources of output fluctuations are aggregate supply shocks. Further, external price shocks and aggregate demand shocks would be, in principle, the most important ones to explain real exchange rate fluctuations.