The intertemporal approach views the current-account balance as the outcome of forward-looking dynamic saving and investment decisions. This paper, a chapter in the forthcoming third volume of the Handbook of International Economics, surveys the theory and empirical work on the intertemporal approach as it has developed since the early 1980s. After reviewing the basic one-good, representative- consumer model, the paper considers a series of extended models incorporating relative prices, complex demographic structures, consumer durables, asset-market incompleteness, and asymmetric information. We also present a variety of empirical evidence illustrating the usefulness of the intertemporal approach, and argue that intertemporal models provide a consistent and coherent foundation for open-economy policy analysis. As such, the intertemporal approach should supplant the expanded versions of the Mundell-Fleming IS-LM model that currently furnish the dominant paradigm used by central banks, finance ministries, and international economic agencies.
This paper develops an analytically tractable empirical model of investment and the current account, and applies it to data from the G-7 countries. This distinction between global and country-specific shock turns out to be quite important for explaining current account behavior; overall the model performs surprisingly well. One apparent puzzle, however, is that the current account responds by much less than investment to country-specific shocks, despite the near unit root behavior of these shocks. We show theoretically that this apparent anomaly can be explained if the shocks have very slow mean reversion.
Article