As Tony Thirlwall puts it in The Nature of Economic Growth, there is a fundamental asymmetry bewteen exports and the other components of aggregate demand: exports are the only component of aggregate demand whose increase determines an inflow of foreign currency. This asymmetry implies that the rate of growth of an economy may be balance-of-payments constrained on the long-run. The paper by Bagnai, Rieber and Tran uses the balance-of-payments constraint to explain the growth performance of Vietnam in the last two decades, as well as to forecast the impact of the global financial crisis on the Vietnamese economy.

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