IMF Staff Country Reports

Guatemala: Selected Issues

August 5, 2024

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Format: Chicago

International Monetary Fund. Western Hemisphere Dept. "Guatemala: Selected Issues", IMF Staff Country Reports 2024, 267 (2024), accessed December 21, 2024, https://doi.org/10.5089/9798400287459.002

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Summary

This Selected Issues paper explores effects of social unrest in Guatemala. The paper estimates the effects of social unrest on Guatemala’s economy from 2001 to 2023, using the monthly Reported Social Unrest Index as a measure of social unrest. The estimations of the empirical model suggest no effects of social unrest episodes on the main external sector variables. The empirical evidence suggests little to no impact of social unrest in Guatemala. Contrary to Hadzi-Vaskov et al. (2023), the analysis of the effects of social unrest in Guatemala suggests that the effects on the real, monetary, financial, and external sectors are mild, limited, and temporary if not negligible. On the one hand, the lack of cross-country dimensionality is a limitation of our analysis, but on the other hand, exploiting monthly data allows us to disentangle unrest episode effects at higher frequencies than other papers in the literature. Overall, the results are robust to different specifications; the set of controls is extensive and includes controls for future social unrest shocks autocorrelations. The results suggest that Guatemala is resilient to unrest shocks at business-cycle frequencies, even of considerable magnitude.

Subject: Balance of payments, Education, Gender, Gender inequality, Labor, Labor force participation, Remittances, Women

Keywords: Gender inequality, Global, Government expenditure gap, Guatemala's economy, Investment agenda, Labor force participation, Remittance inflow, Remittances, Social spending efficiency, Women

Publication Details

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