Search results

The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the degree of sustainability of fiscal debt for a group of Central and Eastern European countries. We apply a battery of time series econometrics methods to show how the financial crisis has affected the debt‐to‐gross domestic product ratio and how the ratio has behaved recently. The results give us important insights into how governments in Central and Eastern Europe have reacted to the accumulation of debt. We distinguish between two groups of countries: one group where the sovereign debt stock stabilized after the crisis, and another where debt has been accumulated more quickly in recent years. The results provide important policy lessons for the authorities responsible.

This article presents an analysis of the sustainability of the current accounts of a group of central and eastern European countries. Given the link between national savings (public and private) and investment, the current account may yield instabilities in fundamental macroeconomic variables. Hence, this analysis is of paramount importance given the 2008-11 debt crises faced by many European economies, and the addition of new countries to the economic and monetary union. By means of unit root tests and fractional integration it is shown that, in general, the ratio of the current account to gross domestic product is a stationary and mean reverting process. However, in some cases, shocks tend to have long-lasting effects, implying that there is no evidence of a potential debt default in this group of countries. Adapted from the source document.

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the mutual dependence between housing prices and housing credit in Estonia, a country that experienced rapid debt accumulation during the 2000s and big swings in house prices during that period.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use Bayesian econometric methods on data spanning 2000–2015.FindingsThe estimations show the interdependence between house prices and housing credit. More importantly, negative housing credit innovations had a stronger effect on house prices than positive ones.Originality/valueThe asymmetry in the linkage between housing credit and house prices highlights important policy implications, in that if central banks increase capital buffers during good times, they can release credit conditions during hard times to alleviate the negative spillover into house prices and the real economy.

Purpose
The Great Leveraging was an episode of rapid credit growth and booming housing markets leading up to the global financial crisis. It is important to identify the key drivers of the Great Leveraging and, to this end, the purpose of this paper is to model the relationship between domestic credit and net foreign liabilities in the EU countries most affected by the crisis.


Design/methodology/approach
The analyses show that domestic credit and net foreign liabilities were cointegrated one-to-one for Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, while there was no cointegration for Ireland. Estimation of vector error correction models (VECMs) shows that the adjustment to deviations from the cointegrating relationship took place through changes in domestic credit for Greece and Italy, while the adjustment was bidirectional for Spain and maybe also for Portugal.


Findings
These results suggest that external factors in the form of foreign capital inflows were important drivers of the pre-crisis leveraging in the southern crisis countries, although to varying degrees across the countries.


Originality/value
Key novelties include the use of stock variables instead of flow variables and the estimation of VECMs for the countries individually instead of in a panel.

In this paper we aim at modelling the long run behaviour of the Real Effective Exchange Rates (REER) for a pool of African countries. Not much attention has been paid to this group of countries, in particular, to the existence of nonlinearities in the long run path of such a variable. Controlling for two sources of nonlinearites, i.e. asymmetric adjustment to equilibrium and nonlinear deterministic trends allows us to gain some insight about the behaviour of the African REER. We find that these sources of nonlinearites help us to explain the apparent unit root behaviour found applying linear unit root tests for most of the countries.

En este trabajo investigamos la presencia de efectos de la agenda de los medios en Argentina desde Junio de 2003 a Diciembre de 2008. Usando una base de datos construida a partir de menciones en periódicos, investigamos dos hipótesis sobre la relación entre las diferentes agendas. Encontramos que existen efectos de agenda significativos durante el período de análisis. Más específicamente, encontramos que el número total de menciones del Presidente afecta positivamente la confianza del público en el gobierno. Finalmente, también encontramos evidencia deuna relación estrecha y estable entre el número total de menciones de noticias económicas y la evolución de los principales indicadores económicos.Palabras clave: Agenda-setting, Opinión Pública, Cointegración, Efectosde Medios.Código JEL: L82, E66. AbstractIn this paper we examine the presence of agenda-setting effects by the print media in Argentina from June 2003 to December 2008. Using previously unavailable monthly data on newspapers mentions we test two hypotheses about the relationship between the different agendas. We find support for the hypothesis that there were media effects during our period of analysis. More specifically, we find that the total number of newspaper mentions of the President positively influenced public confidence in the government. Finally, there is also evidence of a strong and stable relationship between the total number of economic news and leading economic indicators.Keywords: Agenda-setting, Public Opinion, Cointegration, Media Effects.JEL Code: L82, E66.