Terms of trade cycles in extreme land abundant countries, 1870-2009. Spectral analysis.

Documentos de Trabajo IAES

Universidad de Alcalá. Instituto Universitario de Análisis Económico y Social

Lugar: Alcalá de Henares; Año: 2011

1139-6148

pectral analysis is applied to the empirical identification of terms of trade cycles, in the secular evolution, 1870-2009, of a group of extreme-land-abundant countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Uruguay. Estimates of the power density spectrum functions produce statistically significant spectral peaks associated with long-run cycle periods between 24 and 56 years, with a mode of about 28 years for all five countries, and the variance decomposition shows that these long-run cycles account for a very substantial fraction, between 68% and 83%, of the TOT total variance. These results are very robust to changes in the choice of truncation lag, as well as to the type of spectral window (Parzen and Bartlett) used in the estimations.