F36 - Financial Aspects of Economic IntegrationNávrat zpět

The article in the context of the current Greek crisis analyses the consequences of forced unification, occurring in the European Union, at least since the Maastricht Treaty, which is now associated mainly with the process of monetary union. The current stage of European integration is based on political constructivism and it is characterized by the dominance of politics over economy, which in some aspects of the system resembles the communist economy system, which was an extreme distortion of the relationship between politics and economy. The unification model of European integration does not help the weaker European Union countries, for it forces them to use various forms of standardization that brings high (often hidden) costs (exceeding profits). The article notes that the main prize in the economy is the exchange rate. The reason for the imbalances within the monetary union is a non-optimal exchange rate for each member country - too overvalued rate of Greece, but also too undervalued rate of Germany. The text also discusses limitations (systemic and political) and inability to perform adequate internal devaluation and systematic (not just partial, parametric) reforms in Greece. The congenital structural differences among the EU countries and the impossibility of the exchange rate adaptation lead to a systemic Eurozone defect, which results in a fact, that it is not (and, in the present composition, it even cannot be) an optimal currency area.

The objective of the article is to identify impact of economic policy implications on current financial and economic crisis. The analysis examines a hypothesis that the main causes of financial and economic crisis include unbalanced developments of the macroeconomic sphere as well as existing weaknesses of banking systems, which often do not evolve in line with the development of economy fundamentals. The article is going to inspect three areas: (i) What development trends and economic policy were registered in the pre-crisis period in order to identify the main causes of economic fluctuations of economy; (ii) How economic policies responded to the course of the financial and economic crisis; (iii) What was the effect financial crisis had on the real economy development? The main task for after-crisis periods is to improve setting of monetary and fiscal policy, bank risk management system and also system for monitoring and analysing the business cycle.

Our paper focuses on the analysis of supply and demand shocks and on the estimation of expected costs of introducing Euro currency into Czech Republic (CR). The analysis is based on the theory of optimal currency areas by Mundell (1961, 1973) and uses a macroeconomic approach formalized by Bayoumi (1994). VAR models and the Blanchard-Quah decomposition (Blanchard and Quah, 1989) are used in order to simulate aggregated macroeconomic impulse response dynamics and to isolate supply and demand shocks for further inspection. Based on the analysis performed we conclude that given current circumstances and persistent differences in symmetry of economic shocks in CR and selected Euro zone countries, the costs from introducing the Euro to CR (as measured by fluctuations of real macroeconomic variables) would be nonzero, however presumably not significantly different from equivalent costs experienced in Austria or Slovakia (i.e. not prohibitive or signifi cantly damaging).

We analyze effect of intraday information flow in three emerging EU stock markets-the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. We use five-minute intraday data on stock market index returns and 15 types of EU and U.S. macroeconomic announcements during 2004-2007. We measure each announcement as its difference from market expectation. Mean and variance equations are jointly estimated. We bring evidence of strong spillovers from matured stock markets as well as effects of the macroeconomic news originating thereby. We find varying effects of the real economy news. Information on current account and prices has strong effect across all markets. We find limited evidence of the economic climate news and no evidence of the monetary announcements. Volatility of the returns is accounted for at the beginning and end of the trading session and it declines dramatically during the rest of the day. The three emerging markets react to information flow in a similar manner as matured markets.

In the course of exchange rate development history of the countries taking part and evaluated in ERM or ERM II before they entered the euro-area there was no depreciating evolution with a trend to currency crisis at all. Fundamental indicators of these economies, partly owing to the compliance with other Maastricht criteria, do not induce devaluation expectancions of investors. However, there is a danger in two other lines. Firstly there is the possibility of so called pure contagion, secondly there are specifics connected directly with taking part in ERM II (wrong configuration of the central parity, appreciating exchange rate overshooting or advancing the date of the euro conversion). The second generation models of currency crisis admits the risk of crisis even without an outstanding decline of fundamental indicators. Taking part of exchange rate in ERM II is a suitable application of the model. Under specific conditions, when taking part in ERM II should trend to the compliance with the exchange rate convergency criterion at the same time, there is a small expectancy of a speculative attack success.

The article deals with the evaluation of the foreign exchange market integration of the new EU Member States - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The main aim of this paper is to introduce and to test, if the Central-European sentiment on the foreign exchange market exists and how strong it is. We apply the analysis of harmonizing (by means of standard and rolling correlation analysis), the concept of beta-convergence (through the use of the standard and rolling correlation analysis, state-space model and panel regression analysis), which could identify the speed of financial integration and the concept of sigma-convergence, which could extrapolate the degree of financial integration. We find that from the entry to the EU in May 2004 the mutual relationship with Central-European currencies relative to euro significantly increase.

The paper deals with unintended consequences of the monetary union for the level of debt in the member countries of the eurozone. First, it is shown that there exist systematic inflation and real interest rate differentials among the member countries. These differentials reach up to 3 percentage points per year between the high inflation countries (e.g. Ireland) and the low inflation ones (e.g. Germany). Different rates of growth of private or total domestic debt in individual countries were closely connected to inflation differentials. Thus the debt was rising very rapidly in high inflation countries. Surprisingly, national saving rates remained stable in most countries so they cannot explain the differences in growth rates of the debt. Instead we proposed a portfolio model of the debt according to which the change in the debt is due to a reshuffle of individual portfolios. The model also implies that asset prices should change in the same direction as does the debt. This seems to have been the case in the eurozone as well.

The aim of the article is a systemic summarization of processes, ways and main determinants influencing the relation between costs and benefits connected with the CR accession to the European Union. Author attempts to find out and to classify moments on macroeconomic both microeconomic level which are relevant for maximization of the realized economic effect. New conditions of the EU single market and importance of quick adaptation of enterprises' activities to them are being discussed.