Since the beginning of the 21st century, many Latin American countries have been ruled by governments characterized as populist (the so-called new Latin American Left). We focus on the macroeconomic implications of the policies adopted by these governments (instead of their leaders’ rhetoric) and we investigate to what extent this characterization holds. In particular, we focus on their wage policies by doing a Structural Vector Autoregressive analysis and assuming that populist shocks have no long-run effects on real wages. This identification implies that populist leaders prioritize redistribution through nominal wages disregarding the evolution of productivity. The results indicate that economic populism is not as widespread as previously thought. Instead, our approach leads to more nuanced results: while we find that there is populism in Argentina, the results for Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador show only sporadic populist events. In the remaining countries, we do not find persistent economic populism.

进入21世纪以来，许多拉美国家被以民粹主义为特征的政府（即所谓的新拉美左派）统治。我们关注这些政府所采取政策的宏观经济影响（而不是其领导人的言论），并调查这种特征在多大程度上适用。特别是，我们通过进行结构向量自回归分析并假设民粹主义冲击对实际工资没有长期影响来关注他们的工资政策。这种识别意味着民粹主义领导人优先考虑通过名义工资进行的再分配，而忽略生产力的演变。结果表明，经济民粹主义并不像以前认为的那样普遍。相反，我们的方法会导致更细微的结果：虽然我们发现阿根廷存在民粹主义，但巴西、玻利维亚和厄瓜多尔的结果只显示零星的民粹主义事件。在其余国家，我们没有发现持久的经济民粹主义。