Łukasz Goczek

Determinants of card payments

ABSTRACT Although the development of the card payment system allows for lowering the costs of money circulation and thereby leads to significant economic gains, relatively small amount of research has been dedicated to the analysis of the determinants of this development. Therefore, the aim of the article is to seek cross-country determinants of retail card payments focusing on trust in the system. The article concentrates on two econometric models. One is constructed with the use of representative population survey data for Poland, the other is based on panel data from the EU countries in the years 2000–2012.

On the Evolution of Corruption Patterns in the Post-Communist Countries

In this paper, we study the evolution of corruption patterns in 27 post-communist countries during the period 1996-2012 using the Control of Corruption Index and the corruption category Markov transition probability matrix. This method allows us to generate the long-run distribution of corruption among the post-communist countries. Our empirical findings suggest that corruption in the post-communist countries is a very persistent phenomenon that does not change much over time. Several theoretical explanations for such a result are provided.

Initial conditions and privatisation as causes of post-communist corruption

Abstract This article investigates the economic determinants of corruption in post-communist countries. We conduct an empirical verification of two research hypotheses using EBRD and World Bank data on 27 post-communist economies over the 1996–2014 period. The first hypothesis suggests that corruption is rooted in the communist past, when these countries embraced communist institutions, social norms, as well as low-development structural factors broadly defined as initial conditions. The second hypothesis is that the flawed transition process led corruption to increase because politics and business were never separated. The elites pushed measures that preserved their status while obstructing reform policies that might endanger their interests. Our empirical results demonstrate that both hypotheses are valid to a limited extent, while revealing a more complex view of the reforms and initial conditions. Corruption seems to be related to the natural resource curse, to the lack of small-scale privatisation and to a long history of underdevelopment that could have preceded communism.

Corruption, Privatisation and Economic Growth in Post-communist Countries

Abstract This article empirically investigates the effects of corruption and privatisation on economic growth in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR. We use a corruption and privatisation augmented open-economy leader–follower endogenous growth model to derive our research hypotheses. In this setting, corruption, privatisation and external openness jointly determine the per capita income in the follower economy. This model predicts that economies with higher shares of private ownership, lower corruption, and higher external openness enjoy higher rates of growth. Our empirical verification of these predictions is based on a panel of 29 post-communist countries during the period 1996–2014. Our estimation results confirm the negative effects of corruption, while the positive effects of privatisation are limited to small-scale privatisation.

Loan loss provisions during the financial crisis in Ukraine

This article investigates the determinants of impaired loans in the Ukrainian banking sector using bank balance sheet data at the micro level. The case of Ukraine is exceptionally interesting because the particularly severe contagion from the global financial crisis turned into a prolonged economic crisis resulting in large loan loss provisions. It seems, however, that both macroeconomic and bank-specific variables have an effect on loan quality as the banks have not been uniformly affected by the crisis. It seems that banks that do not specialise in loans were particularly affected with deteriorating asset quality. The authors’ estimation results are based on dynamic panel regression methods on a unique dataset of Ukrainian banks with quarterly frequency from 2005 to 2013 to avoid problems associated with using samples from the BankScope database.

Oczekiwane a rzeczywiste koszty i korzyści wstąpienia Polski do Unii Gospodarczej i Walutowej – wybrane aspekty

Oczekiwane a rzeczywiste koszty i korzyści wstąpienia Polski do Unii Gospodarczej i Walutowej – wybrane aspekty