Macroeconomic policies after the 2008 financial crisis: lessons from brazilian and chinese experiences

During the 2008 crisis the mainstream macroeconomics was unable to provide an adequate set of tools to combat the economic recession, triggering a debate on the theoretical basis of the dominant macroeconomic thinking and consequently on the kind of macroeconomic policy that should be implemented during and after a crisis. This discussion may lead to a fundamental change in the general approach to the use of fiscal and monetary policies as a tool for economic recovery. In this sense, the objective of this dissertation is to support this debate through the empirical study of the Brazilian and Chinese experiences before, during and after 2008. Both countries used unconventional measures to face the crisis and obtained relative success. A Structural VAR (SVAR) is used to verify which type of macroeconomic policy most contributed to the GDP growth of each of the countries during the period between 2000 and 2016. The results show the importance of using both policies, but they indicate a greater relevance of interest rates and government revenue as macroeconomic tools in Brazil and China, respectively. The evaluation of the monetary and fiscal policies adopted by them shows the impossibility of maintaining macroeconomic stability aiming exclusively reasonable inflationary levels through the adjustment of interest rates. Rethinking the way macroeconomic policies are implemented is fundamental in order to adapt the mainstream macroeconomics to the current scenario of the world economy and to avoid the economic stagnation experienced by several developed economies today.