Darja Boršič

Purchasing Power Parity in Transition Economies: Does It Hold in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia?

This article assesses the theory of purchasing power parity for the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia in comparison with Austria, Germany, France and Italy, employing data from January 1992 to December 2006. The unit root tests applied fail to prove stationarity of the real exchange rate series. Although cointegration was found among nominal exchange rates and selected consumer price indices, the theory of purchasing power parity could not be confirmed for any of the three advanced transition countries. Following the literature on price movements and macroeconomic policies in transition economies, we list some arguments that substantiate our findings.

Are we getting closer to purchasing power parity in Central and Eastern European economies

In this article we examine the theory of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) on a sample of Central and Eastern European economies. This article makes two main advances with respect to previous PPP studies. First, it employs a monthly database on real exchange rates for a panel of 12 Central and Eastern European economies by testing the theory separately with respect to the US dollar and to the euro for the period January 1994 to December 2008. Second, we utilize, among other panel unit root tests, the panel Seemingly Unrelated Regressions Augmented Dickey–Fuller (SURADF) test proposed by Breuer et al. (2002), which allows us to identify how many and which members of the panel contain a unit root. As our study found support for the validity of PPP in some reforming European economies, special attention should be devoted to individual country-specific factors that cause PPP deviations.

PPP and nonlinearity of real exchange rates: new evidence from transition economies

In this article, we investigate the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) concept by utilizing a database of monthly real exchange rates from 12 Central and Eastern European economies with respect to different numeraire currencies. Owing to the elaborated limitations of linear specifications by verifying this exchange rate theory, we apply a nonlinear unit root test based on the Exponential Smooth Transition Autoregressive (ESTAR) model proposed by Kapetanios et al. (KSS; 2003). Our analysis shows that after taking into account the nonlinear reversion of real exchange rates of European transition economies with respect to the euro, the validity of PPP is confirmed for the majority of countries in the sample.

Gender Disparities in the Duration of Unemployment Spells in Slovenia

Gender Disparities in the Duration of Unemployment Spells in Slovenia The paper offers an overview of labor market characteristics in Slovenia with an emphasis on gender disparities. A survival analysis is conducted based on an extensive database obtained from the Employment Office of the Republic of Slovenia of more than 450,000 unemployment incidences between January 2004 and July 2008. Kaplan-Meier estimates of survival functions show specific disparities among unemployed women and men in Slovenia. Unemployed men are better off when re-entering the labor market as they are re-employed more quickly than women.

Investigating Purchasing Power Parity in Central and Eastern European Countries: A Panel Data Approach

The goal of this paper is to investigate the validity of PPP for a heterogeneous group of 12 transition countries with respect to dollar and euro. The analysis relies on monthly data frequency covering the period of 1994-2008. The first generation of panel unit root tests is based on the cross-sectional independency hypothesis. This paper applies five first generation unit root tests. The cross-sectional independency hypothesis is rather restrictive and somewhat unrealistic in the majority of macroeconomic applications of unit root tests. Thus, the second generation of panel unit root tests is characterized by the rejection of the cross-sectional independence hypothesis. Within this second generation of tests, two main approaches are distinguished. The first one relies on the factor structure approach. The second approach consists of imposing few or none restrictions on the residuals covariance matrix and has been adopted the use of nonlinear instrumental variables methods or the use of bootstrap approaches to solve the nuisance parameter problem due to cross-sectional dependency. We employ several second generation panel unit root tests in this paper to scrutinize the validity of PPP theory.

Productivity and Economic Growth in the European Union: Impact of Investment in Research and Development

Abstract This paper focuses on investment in research and development as a factor of labour productivity and economic growth. Our analysis confirms the link between expenditure for research and development (expressed in % of GDP) and labour productivity (expressed in the number of hours worked) based on selected data for EU Member States in the period 1995-2013. A causal link between variables of the concave parabola was confirmed, and the value of expenditure for research and development (2.85% of EU GDP) maximising productivity (per hour of work) was determined based on the examined data. In accordance with these findings, EU’s target of reaching 3% of GDP spent on research and development to be achieved by 2020 seems in support of reaching maximum productivity in the EU.

Purchasing power parity in ASEAN+3: an application of panel unit root tests

Abstract The paper assesses the existence of purchasing power parity (PPP) in ASEAN+3 economies taking into account EUR and USD as reference currencies. The research refers to the period from January 2000 to June 2017 and there are three points of view: we tested the period as a whole and then the pre-crisis period and the postcrisis period regarding the structural break due to the economic crisis. The evaluated economies include Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. A range of panel unit root tests are applied, covering the Levin, Lin and Chu test, the Breitung test, the Im, Pesaran and Shin test, the ADF-Fisher test and the PP-Fisher test. In cases where the unit root is rejected, the validity of PPP is confirmed. However, our results are ambiguous and depend on the selection of the base currency, the time period observed and on the choice of the methodology.

Is the PPP valid for the EA-11 countries? New evidence from nonlinear unit root tests

Abstract In the empirical literature there is a prevalent view that real exchange rates tend to converge towards levels predicted by the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) only in the long-run and that short-run deviations from the PPP relationship are frequently sizable. The progressing of European monetary integration and the forming of monetary union spurred the interest of researchers to assess the relevance of the PPP theory in the case of the single European currency. Our paper therefore examines this exchange rate theory by testing a dataset of monthly real exchange rates for a sample of 11 eurozone members with respect to different benchmark currencies. Because of the documented drawbacks of linear specifications in examining this exchange rate theory, we utilise a nonlinear unit root test based on the ESTAR model proposed by Kapetanios, Shin, and Snell (2003). The results of unit root tests for the US dollar-based real exchange rate series as well as for Japanese yen-based series suggest that the PPP proposition does not hold in the case of eurozone countries. The absence of real exchange rates’ nonlinear reversion reported in this study thus confirms the thesis of Wu and Lin (2011) regarding the PPP relationship since the inception of the euro.

PPP in Central and Eastern European economies: further evidence from panel unit root tests

The question of the validity of the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) hypothesis in European transition countries remains relevant and empirically unsettled. This article aims to contribute to this debate by using an updated monthly database on real exchange rates for 12 Central and Eastern European economies. We implemented a range of panel unit root tests characterized by the rejection of the cross-sectional independence hypothesis and taking the US Dollar (USD) and the euro as numeraire currencies separately into account in the testing procedures. The results reported in this study provide additional evidence supporting the PPP proposition.