Navarra Center for International Development (NCID) Resident Fellow Luis Alberiko Gil-Alana flew to Guatemala to participate in the 2018 Seminar of Economic Researchers of Guatemala (SIEG) which the central Banco de Guatemala organizes each year. The session took place last 25th of October and congregated top researchers from all around the world who undergo economic research on the Central American country.

Luis Alberiko presented during the second of the four sessions that took place at the event. He presented the paper A FCVAR Model For The Central American Economy, in which he has co-worked with former NCID research assistant and current Bank of Lithuania’s Héctor Cárcel. The investigation uses univariate and multivariate I(d) techniques in the analysis of the Central American economy by looking at three variables, prices, interest rates and monetary base on the six countries that form the CMCA (Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Dominican Rep.).

His session was shared with other two conferences. The first was by Astrid Alaya and Szabolcs Blazsek from the School of Business of the Francisco Marroquín University, who presented their paper New score-driven models for trimming and winsorizing: An application for Guatemalan Quetzal to US Dollar. The session was closed by Karina Lisseth Ramírez Morales with her paper Relación entre productividad y tipo de cambio real: Efecto Balassa-Samuelson para 17 países de América Latina.

The NCID researcher says it was “an interesting event related with the analysis of temporal series with the objective of achieving financial and monetary stability in Guatemala.