The Interdependence between Credit and Real Business Cycles in Latin American Economies
The series Working Papers on Economics is published by the Office for Economic Studies at the Banco de la República (Central Bank of Colombia). The works published are provisional, and their authors are fully responsible for the opinions expressed in them, as well as for possible mistakes. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Banco de la República or its Board of Directors.
In this document we estimate credit and GDP cycles for three Latin-American economies and study their relation in the time and frequency domains. Cycles are estimated in order to analyze their medium and short-term frequencies. We find that short-term cycles are usually more volatile than medium-term cycles for credit and GDP in Chile, Colombia and Peru. We also find that credit-cycle peaks in the middle 1990s and middle 2000s precede notable GDP recessions 2 or 3 years later in these countries. Additionally, credit cycles in Latin-American economies tend to cause later movements in economic activity. This effect can be decomposed into two components: first, a negative effect in the case of business-cycle frequencies, and a positive effect in the case of medium-term GDP fluctuations.
