F42 - International Policy Coordination and TransmissionNávrat zpět

We analyze corruption and economic freedom links to public finance and investment in new EU members. In terms of the public investment our results show that improvement in economic freedom is linked to increases in public investment while lowering of corruption is linked with increase or decrease with respect to public investment. As a complementary finding we show that increases in public investment are also linked with the ambiguous effect. In case of public finance our estimates suggest that debt usually decreases as economic regulation goes down while the effect on budget deficit goes both ways. On other hand, as corruption declines both budget deficit and debt decrease. Based on our results we generalize that measures taken to lower corruption and economic regulation should lead to improvements in fiscal position in most of the new EU member states.

The article is concerned with analysis of independence of central banks of the EU Member States within the framework of the ESCB, as well as independence and responsibility of the ECB, and suggests an alternative institutional embodiment of its position, reflecting the specific framework of the EMU. The system of selection of members of the ECB's Executive Board blurs a real collective responsibility towards Member States, which opens possibilities for nontransparent lobbyism. Modified system is suggested so that national bank's governors have a symbolic relationship to the political representation, i.e. that they reflect a national economic policy in some way, without being bound and restricted by its formation whatsoever.

In this contribution, we compare the correlation of supply and demand shocks for the countries of the euro zone and the acceding countries in Central Europe. Demand and supply shocks are recovered from estimated structural VAR models of output growth and inflation in individual countries. We find that Poland and Hungary face already a comparably high similarity with the countries of the current euro zone. However, the remaining countries show still significant differences in business cycles as compared to the euro zone. This is likely to indicate that the loss of monetary sovereignty may be costly. In turn, the integration is expected to align the business cycles of these countries in the medium run. We document a similar development for the countries of the European Union in the 1990s.