Financial Fragility in Small Open Economies: Firm Balance Sheets and the Sectoral Structure

Episodes of large capital inflows in small open economies are often associated with a shift of resources from the tradable to the non-tradable sector and sometimes lead to balance-of-payments crises. This article builds a two-sector dynamic model to study the evolution of the sectoral structure and its impact on financial fragility. The model embeds a static mechanism of balance-of-payments crisis which produces multiple equilibria within a single time period when the non-tradable sector is large enough compared to the tradable sector. The article studies the dynamics induced by an increase in financial openness. It shows that the relative size of the non-tradable sector overshoots, which makes the economy more likely to be financially fragile during the transitory dynamics. Using an extended version of the model, the article conducts a quantitative analysis and shows that this mechanism accounts well for several episodes of large capital inflows that led to financial crises.