Ownership and Investment Behaviour in Transition Countries: A Case Study of Collective and Corporate Farms in the Czech Republic. Factor Markets Working Paper No. 17, February 2012

Cooperative and corporate farms have retained an important role for agricultural production in many transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Despite this importance, these farms' ownership structure, and particularly the ownership's effect on their investment activity, which is vital for efficient restructuring and the sector's future development, are still not well understood. This paper explores the ownership-investment relationship using data on Czech farms from 1997 to 2008. We allow for ownership-specific variability in farm investment behaviour analyzed by utilizing an error-correction accelerator model. Empirical results suggest significant differences in the level of investment activity, responsiveness to market signals, investment lumpiness, as well as investment sensitivity to financial variables among farms with different ownership characteristics. These differences imply that the internal structure of the Czech cooperative and corporate farms will be developing in the direction of a decreasing number of owners and an increasing ownership concentration.

The grand divergence: global and European current account surpluses. Bruegel Working Paper 2015/08, 13 August 2015

Global current account imbalances widened before the 2007/2008 crisis and have narrowed since. While the post-crisis adjustment of European current account deficits was in line with global developments (though more forceful), European current account surpluses defied global trends and increased. We use panel econometric models to analyse the determinants of medium-term current account balances. Our results confirm that higher fiscal balances, higher GDP per capita, more rapidly aging populations, larger net foreign assets, larger oil rents and better legal systems increase the medium-term current account balance, while a larger growth differential and a higher old-age dependency ratio reduce it. European current account surpluses became excessive during the past twelve years according to our estimates, while they were in line with model predictions in the preceding three decades. Generally, the gap between the actual current account and its fitted value in the model has a strong predictive power for future current account changes. Excess deficits adjust more forcefully than excess surpluses. However, in the 2004-07 period, excess imbalances were amplified, which was followed by a forceful correction in 2008-15, with the exception of European surpluses.