Structural changes of economics in poland and New German Countries

The process of transition of the Polish economy from a centrally planned to a market economy started in the 1980s by a series of attempts to introduce economic reforms. By 1990–95, more important changes took place. The political and economic changes in the German Democratic Republic began near the end of 1989. The first step was the monetary union of both German states in June 1990. Although German unification (in October 1990) took place relatively later than the Polish reforms, the East German changes were greater. This paper discusses various macroeconomic indicators in both regions for the period 1990–95. These indicators are the dynamics and structure of gross domestic product, population number and employment, unemployment rate, and consumption structure.     

Changes in living conditions in Poland under economic transition

This paper presents changes in living conditions which have taken place in Polish provinces during the transformation period. To define the changes, 31 measures grouped into 12 fields have been established representing some basic aspects of living conditions. They years 1990 and 1994 were taken as the period of comparison. For analysis of changes in the value of living conditions, indicators were made using the statistical measures of dispersion, dynamics, and a graphic method. The average standard of living has decreased by 4.5 of one percentage point. Among 49 administrative provinces in Poland, only seven noted an increase. It is concluded that there are growing regional disparities in the living conditions of Polish people     

Inflation processes in poland during the transformation period

From 1989 to 1997, the price of goods and consumer services rose very quickly under the influence of strong inflationary processes that took place in the Polish economy. Those processes were also present during the time of a centrally controlled economy. However, they did not appear as an open price inflation. This paper presents an analysis of inflationary processes before and during the transformation period. Special attention is paid to measuring inflation and to the utilization value of indices used for this kind of analysis. The most popular measure of inflation is the consumer price index (CPI). This paper presents a few examples of the many uses of the CPI. The focus is on the interpretation of this index which has special characteristics for the systemic transformation period taking place in Poland.     

Natural Resources,Institutional Quality,and Economic Growth in China

The resource curse has been mainly studied using cross-country samples. In this paper we analyze a cross-province sample from one country: China. We focus on the interplay between resource abundance, institutional quality, and economic growth, using two different measures of resource abundance (a stock: resource reserves; and a flow: resource revenues), and employing various econometric approaches including varying coefficient models. We find that resource abundance has a positive effect on economic growth at the provincial level in China between 1990 and 2008, an effect that depends nonlinearly on institutional quality (1995 confidence in courts). The ‘West China Development Drive’ policy, initiated in 2000, caused substantial changes, which we investigate through a comparative panel-data analysis.     

Neural networks as a forecasting instrument for the polish stock exchange

The transformation of the economic systems taking place in Central and Eastern European countries has ruined the previous structures, even though the market economy mechanisms have not been created yet. The present mechanisms of economies in transition have not been recognized yet. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to apply traditional quantitative methods such as statistics, time series analysis, and econometrics to describe the economic system and to forecast the further development of the economic phenomena. In this paper, the author discusses the experience of constructing artificial neural networks and forecasts (using neural networks) for the Polish Stock Exchange in the early transition period. The traditional approach to prediction using an econometric model to compare the results obtained applying different methods will also be presented.     

Shocked by therapy? Unemployment in the first years of the socio-economic transition in Poland and its long-term consequences

We examine the long-term implications of unemployment for material conditions and well-being using the Polish sample from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Retrospective data from the SHARELIFE survey are used to reconstruct labour market experiences across the threshold of the socio-economic transformation from a centrally planned to a free market economy in Poland. These individual experiences are matched with outcomes observed in the survey about 20 years later to examine their correlation with unemployment at the time of the transition. We find that becoming unemployed in the early 1990s correlates significantly with income, assets and a number of measures of well-being recorded in 2007 and 2012. Using plant closures to reflect exogenous changes to labour market status at the time of the transition, we are able to confirm the causal effect of unemployment on income and house ownership 20 years later, but find no evidence for a long-term causal relationship between unemployment and such measures of well-being as life satisfaction, depression and subjective assessment of material conditions.     

Merger activity in the waste disposal industry: the impact and the implications of the Environmental Protection Act

Over the last two and a half decades, the UK's waste disposal industry has evolved from a disparate collection of localized small-scale operators to a coherent multimillion pound industry. With particular reference to the 1990 Environmental Protection Act, this paper uses multinomial logit analysis to estimate the degree to which increased regulation of the industry has led to a rise in merger activity within the sector. It is shown that the Act did increase the probability of a waste disposal firm being associated with merger activity, either as an acquiring firm or as a target for other firms. As a result, intra-industry consolidation took place alongside attempts by non-waste disposal firms to diversify their interests within a buoyant sector which was avoiding the recessionary downturn affecting other sectors of the British economy.     

Democracy and Accession to GATT/WTO

In this paper we argue that the level of democracy of an applicant country affects the time it takes to gain General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO) accession. An extensive empirical search suggests that the GATT/WTO accession duration is likely to be shorter for an applicant whose political regime is more democratic. Meanwhile, countries that initiated applications before 1995 took longer to accede to GATT than those that initiated applications after 1995 to accede to the WTO. The GATT/WTO accession is shortened if the applicant country's economy is large. Such findings are robust to the choice of different econometric methods, data sets and model specifications.     

Poland's agricultural sector under transformation

The Polish agricultural sector and food processing industry was the first industry to follow market economy because of agriculture's significance in the Polish economy and the dominant role of private ownership in agriculture. Full price liberalization, internal convertibility of the Polish currency, and liberalization of foreign trade completely changed the situation in agriculture. The main objective of this paper is to test the existence of market processes using monthly data from the agriculture and food processing industry covering the time period 1990–92. The largest part of the estimation is dedicated to agricultural products' and foodstuffs' prices. Typical demand-supply relations are observed on the pig, cattle, and milk markets only. In many equations, such variables like imports and exports of agricultural goods are not significant.     

Currency demand and the growth of the underground economy in Canada, 1991-1995

The extent to which the recent introduction of a value-added tax in Canada contributed to the growth of the underground economy remains controversial. If underground economy growth led to increased currency holdings and shifted the currency demand function, forecasts for the period after the introduction of the tax should tend to underestimate currency holdings. Using a cointegration-based error correction mechanism in vector autoregression models, currency demand is estimated using quarterly data for 1968–1990 and dynamic forecasts are made for 1991–1995. On average, currency demand is underpredicted, but by a small amount. The results are consistent with an increase in the underground economy of between 0.01 and 0.3% of GDP as a result of the new tax. If changes in marginal direct tax rates are considered, the underground economy may have grown between 0.1 and 0.7% of GDP in 1991–1995.     

Changing composition of human capital The Czech Republic,Hungary and Poland1

We show that business education/occupations have expanded and that technical education/occupations have contracted in the Czech Republic and Poland since 1990. We interpret these changes as an adjustment necessary for their transition to a market economy. We do not find the same pattern in Hungary, which we attribute to the earlier timing of its transition. We construct an aggregate model in which labour reallocates in response to changing demand structure. When calibrated with the Czech and Polish data, the model generates a large movement of workers with technical education and experience into business occupations in the early 1990s. The discounted sum of output loss due to the gap between the demand structure and the composition of existing human capital amounts to between 8 and 40 percent of 1990 GDP.     

Simulation model of the polish economy

This paper presents some results of the simulation model of the Polish economy in transition from the planned to market one. The simulation model is nonlinear and dynamic. It consists of 800 balance equations, 40 of which are difference state equations. The basic time unit is one quarter while the calculation horizon spans between three and 10 years. It was calibrated to the 1994–96 statistical data. The model contains the aggregates of production (divided between the state and private sectors and three production branches), households, public sector, banking system, and foreign trade. The simulation attempts to forecast chosen macroeconomic variables resulting from different scenarios. Sets of effective (Pareto-optimal) solutions and effective growth paths of economy were obtained. The simulation results help to better understand the macroeconomic process in the transition period and can be useful for central-level decisionmakers. This work was partially supported by grant No. 1 HO2B 023 09 from Komitet Badan Naukowych (Polish State Committee for Scientific Research).     

A Conversation with Kurt Rothschild

Kurt Rothschild was born in Vienna in 1914. In 1938 he came to Glasgow as a refugee from the Nazis, and taught there until his return to Austria in 1947. Between 1947 and 1966 he was a researcher at the Austrian Economic Research Institute in Vienna (WIFO), specialising in labour market and trade issues; he still works for WIFO as a consultant. From 1966 until 1985 he was Professor of Economics at the University of Linz. Two volumes of his collected papers appeared in the 1990s (Rothschild, 1993, 1995). His recent publications include Rothschild (2004a, 2004b, 2006, 2007a, 2007b). This interview took place in Vienna on 1 November 2007.     

Financial Inflows to Poland, 1990–96

Foreign exchange flows in Poland in the 1990s, especially during 1994–96, resulted from two developments. First, there was a current account surplus, as growth revived due to efficiency improvements, while macroeconomic policy limited domestic demand. Second, Poland had rejoined international capital markets and regained favorable credit ratings, triggering investment inflows. We can classify the effects of these inflows into three groups: changes in the institutional framework; changes in the stabilization path; and changes in the real economy. The crawling band introduced in May 1995, rapid development of the money market, and improvement of the central bank's capacity to intervene on that market are in the first group. As to the second, relative currency appreciation and import competition, constraining domestic price increases, contributed to the strong disinflationary push which began in 1995. Under the third heading, foreign direct investment and portfolio inflows helped to maintain rapid growth of investment and output.     

A model for investment in Poland: A disequilibrium econometrics approach

A demand/supply type econometric model for investments in the Polish economy is analysed. Starting from microeconomic foundations, functions describing the behaviour of central planners and state enterprises are derived. The model is estimated using annual data for the period 1961–1980. It is used for simulation of investment excess demand and consumption response to smoothing of the investment process. The results indicate that investment excess demand was positive in 1960–1979 and negative in 1980. Simulated response of consumption supply to smoothing of the investment process is up to 37% over the observed consumption level.     

Formal and real ownership structure of the Polish economy: state-owned versus state-controlled enterprises

This article analyses the difference between the state’s formal and real shares in the Polish economy. We identify two basic types of corporate control exercised by the state over enterprises through ownership (in the case of majority ownership) and non-ownership tools (in the case of minority ownership). Consequently, we distinguish between two types of state enterprises: state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and state-controlled enterprises (SCEs). In post-communist economies, SCEs mainly originate from so-called reluctant privatisation, in which the transfer of ownership rights takes place without the appropriate transfer of control rights. We discuss the tools of non-ownership control used by the state. Our estimates of the real share of state enterprises in the Polish economy (which include both SOEs and SCEs) show that it is almost two times higher than the formal share (only SOEs). The share of state enterprises is also highest in the group of Poland’s largest and most important firms. We conclude that the real importance of state enterprises in the Polish economy is much higher than might be expected if only the formal share of state ownership is taken into account.     

Accumulation pattern of the Brazilian economy in the 1990s and 2000s

This paper investigates the dynamic relationships among income distribution, debt ratio and capital accumulation in the Brazilian economy in the 1990s and 2000s. One explanation for the relatively slow growth of the Brazilian economy is the relatively low rate of investment. The paper presents an econometric model, based on Nishi, to investigate the causes of instability in investment in the period. It concludes that the Brazilian economy since the economic opening presents a debt-burdened pattern of capital accumulation.     

A system approach for measuring the euro area NAIRU

This paper addresses the issue of measuring the NAIRU for the euro area and assessing the robustness and precision of the obtained estimates. The empirical framework adopted is based on systems combining an Okun-type relationship between cyclical unemployment and the output gap with a Phillips curve and stochastic laws of motion for the NAIRU and potential output. Such systems have been estimated using Kalman-filter techniques. The results obtained point to an estimate of the area-wide NAIRU that is robust to changes in the underlying models. This robustness is shown to hold both in terms of the mean – i.e., the shape of the resulting NAIRU – and the variance of the process. The latter is derived through bootstrap exercises using the models alone or pooled together. The evidence found suggests that the increase in the aggregate NAIRU that took place in the early part of the sample period has come to a halt and may be about to be reversed.Jel classification: C11, C15, E31, E32The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institutions they belong to. The authors are grateful to Per Jansson for providing parts of the econometric RATS code and to Gonzalo Camba-Mendez and Frank Smets of the ECB for useful comments. Comments and recommendations by two anonimous referees are also gratefully acnowledged. All the remaining errors are the authors responsibility. All correspondence to Ricardo Mestre.First version received: January 2002/Final version received December 2002     

数字经济如何影响城市出口产品质量 ———基于长三角地区数据的实证分析

本文采用空间计量模型,以我国长三角地区41个地级市 2006—2015 年的面板数据为研究样本,实证分析研究了数字经济对城市出口产品质量的影响。结果表明,城市间出口产品质量总体上存在空间正相关性,数字经济会显著提升城市出口产品质量,该结论在稳健性检验中仍成立。机制检验表明,数字经济通过促进技术创新,提高进口中间品质量,推动出口产品结构高端化,进而提升城市出口产品质量。异质性分析表明,数字经济对非私营企业出口产品质量有显著提升作用;相对于其他城市而言,数字经济对特大及以上城市出口产品质量的提升作用更明显。     

基于ECM的我国税收弹性实证分析

运用时间数列和计量分析方法,利用1978--2006年我国税收收入和GDP数据,针对1978—1994年和1995--2006年两个阶段分别建立误差修正模型,对我国税收的长期弹性和短期弹性进行分析。研究结果发现：1978—1994年我国税收的长期弹性小于其短期弹性;自1995年以来,我国税收弹性发生了显著变化,税收的长期弹性大于其短期弹性。