Crecimiento económico del Ecuador: análisis econométrico desde Cobb Douglas, periodo 1990-2016.

Abstract

This article monitors the behavior of economic growth that Ecuador has experienced through three variables of great importance for the dynamism of the economy, such as Gross Formation of Fixed Capital (FBKF), Economically Active People (PEA), as return variables , and National Production (Gross Domestic Product), as a returned variable; taking cross-sectional data from the official platform of the Central Bank of Ecuador (ECB) from 1990 to 2014 at constant prices, a period that represents the before and after dollarization, applying as a fundamental basis for analysis, the theory of production function of Cobb Douglas, which dates back to 1928 and which enjoys, from its creation up to the present day, this kind of econometric analysis, where the individual participations of each of the variables (FBKF and PEA) are measured in terms of constant elasticities, that is to say the percentage increase for each unit that increases a variable in same terms; This methodology, in turn, had a descriptive, investigative approach with quantitative scope, backed by some theoretical sources of scientific papers, as well as high-level academic books and bibliography. They will support the specification of the econometric modeling chosen and the state of the art of the present investigation. Said function yielded as main results, constant returns of scale in the studied data, since the total value of the sum of the betas coefficients (0.96) was less than 1, in which it was further evidenced that for the case of Ecuador the variable that had the strongest impact on economic growth, was the economically active population (labor force / PEA), which in contrast to the gross formation of fixed capital (investments / FBKF), which had a much weaker pact than the aforementioned. Which leads to conclude that the economic dynamism of Ecuador is due to the workforce, which according to the government entity Central Bank of Ecuador, in its largest percentage is informal category, ie people who are not due to any company of the private or public sector, but rather, it exerts this labor force through non-regulated or stabilized trade activities. It should also be mentioned that the low participation of gross fixed capital formation in production (Gross Domestic Product / GDP) was due to the weak investments made by the strategic sectors, especially the private sector that carries the highest values. These results were supported by different statistical tests, which evaluated the normality of variables with Shapiro Wilk, heteroscedasticity, multicollinearity through the inflation factor of variance "VIF", coefficient of determination or R ^ 2 for the adjustment of the model, p - value for the significance of the variables individually, Fisher's F, and Jarque Bera to measure the existence of atypical data of the residues. The results obtained were not dissimilar to others carried out in economies such as Colombia and Mexico in recent decades.