Over the last two decades the share of CEE countries' exports of goods in world exports more than doubled, despite considerable appreciation of their real effective exchange rates. Inspired by this observation, we set out to establish which factors had impact on their export performance. For that purpose, we run a series of panel regressions in which export market shares are explained by various measures of price/cost competitiveness, technological advancement and institutional environment. We make two important contributions to the subject literature. We show that technological factors, specifically innovative outputs (patent applications), had the most significant positive impact on export performance and that was in addition to their impact through the economic potential. Moreover, we verify the impact of the quality of the institutional environment on exports. Specifically, we show that improvements in the overall regulatory quality were conducive to increasing export market shares. The results regarding price/cost competitiveness are less robust and depend on the measure used. Hence, we conclude that further gains in non-price competitiveness should be considered for the region to compete successfully in international markets in the long run.
The literature on the behavior of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has focused on static voting patterns. We find statistical support for a dynamic pattern using a panel reaction function to analyze MPC votes over the 1997-2008 period. We find that internal and external members do not behave differently in their first year on the MPC. In their third year of tenure, internal members prefer higher policy rates, placing a higher weight on price stability and a lower weight on the output gap than external members.
We develop a theoretical framework for studying the effects of interaction on the quality of decision-making by monetary policy committees. We show that interaction, ie increasing one's expertise through an exchange of views, is most likely not to result in interdependent voting behaviour. Therefore, and in contrast to earlier literature, we find that interaction is beneficial for the collective outcome.Jel Codes: E52, E58, D83, D71
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