Unfulfilled expectations about economic growth in Brazil has led many observers to question the ability of the new, open trade regime to put the economy back on an path of sustainable growth. Whereas the country’s growth record has been really poor, the evidence suggests that the underlying...

This paper analyzes the trends and fluctuations of the price and real indexes of Brazilian and Argentine exports and imports in 1980-2002. The analysis uses quarterly data and obtains the trend and fluctuations by applying either the Hodrick-Prescott or the band-pass filter (with periodicity...