What Drives Consumption Booms?
利用跨国样本数据，评估了多种消费繁荣解释的适用性，发现贸易条件改善和宏观经济预期提升带来的财富效应比财政现象或价格扭曲更重要。
Consumption booms have been common in both industrial and developing countries, and several explanations have been offered for their occurrence. These include economy-wide wealth effects associated with favorable movements in the terms of trade or eu-phoric expectations triggered by macroeconomic reforms, Ricardian effects associated with fiscal stabilization, lending booms following financial liberalization, and a variety of distortions m mtertemporal relative prices. Using a large cross-country sample of booms, this article assesses how widely applicable these explanations are. The key find-ing is that wealth effects linked to favorable movements in the terms of trade and antici-pated improvements in macroeconomic performance seem to have been more important empirically than explanations relying primarily on fiscal phenomena or distortions in intertemporal relative prices. Consumption booms, common in both industrial and developing countries, have been associated with a variety of macroeconomic events, including stabilization of high inflation, surges in capital inflows, the implementation of market-oriented structural reforms (especially trade and financial liberalization), and fa-