Restrições financeiras e o PIB per capita no Brasil

Financial constraints on Brazilian firms are very high compared to advanced economies. In Brazil, 59% of firms have access to a bank loan or a credit line. In developed countries, the average percentage is 95%. Loan collateral requirements are much higher in Brazil (95% of the loan value) than the developed country average (50% of the loan value). The interest rate spread in Brazil is very high in relation to the average of developed countries (12% in Brazil and 3% in developed countries). In this context, the objective of this work is to evaluate the impact of reductions in three different financial constraints on the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in Brazil. In more specific terms, our main goal is to assess which of the three financial frictions (cost of participation in the credit market, borrowing limit or cost of monitoring) is the most important to affect per capita GDP in Brazil. To reach our goal, we used the theoretical framework developed in Dabla-Norris et al. (2015). This structure consists of a version of the neoclassical growth model with heterogeneous agents and three financial frictions. The model is calibrated for the Brazilian economy in 2009 and we perform simulation exercises in which we evaluate the impacts of reductions in financial frictions. In this text, we perform three exercises. In the first one, the reduction in the cost of participation in the credit market (which increases financial access to the level of developed countries) generates an increase in per capita GDP of 3.6%. In the second, the reduction in the cost of monitoring (which raises system efficiency to the level of developed countries) generates a rise in GDP per capita of 1.7%. Finally, in the third, we evaluated a relaxation in the indebtedness constraints that would be obtained if the collaterals as a proportion of the loans in Brazil were equal to the average of the developed countries. The results show that the reduction of collaterals in Brazil would raise GDP per capita by 12%. In this context, the financial constraint with the greatest impact on GDP per capita, in the Brazilian case, is the borrowing limit. In this sense, policies aimed at reducing borrowing constraints will have a greater impact on GDP than policies aimed at reducing the spread or increasing participation in the credit market.