Taking into consideration the specifics of the Russian economy such as dependency on oil and gas drilling & production, and including the current context of the Western sanctions, COVID-19 pandemic, as well as somewhat idiosyncratic potential output development, the main aim of this paper is to quantify recent output gap for Russia. We use three mainstream methodologies: the Hodrick-Prescott filter as a benchmark, the Kalman filter to follow, and the Cobb-Douglas production function. The sample time span ranges from 1995Q1 until 2020Q3, while all calculations are performed on quarterly frequencies. The analysis suggests that given low fixed investment ratios, limited R&D spending in non-military sectors, and adverse demographic development, under a “no policy change” scenario there might soon be even more downward pressures on the country’s potential output growth, and the economy may continue increasing only at a snail’s pace even after a possible withdrawal of the Western sanctions and the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many countries decided to launch car scrapping schemes during the 2009 crisis in order to support their car industries and to boost domestic demand. Owing to the existence of signifi cant international trade links in the automotive sector, there is also a strong theoretical foundation for cross-border eff ects of such scrappage programmes. This paper explores spillovers of the German scheme to the Czech economy on the basis of a close mutual trade link between these two countries and the size of the Czech automotive sector. It is demonstrated that the German programme provided for a signifi cant boost for Czech personal car exports, which were also coupled with increased imports due to large import requirements of the Czech automotive segment. Overall, the contribution of fi rst-round eff ects of the German car scrapping scheme to the Czech real GDP growth in 2009 is estimated to have reached between 0.4 and 0.5 percentage points.
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