Financial Liberalization and Current Account Developments in New EU Member States

Abstract

Abstract Due to negotiations on accession to the EU, the new EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe went through the financial opening. In the pre-crisis period followed by high liquidity in global markets, most of the EU new member states experienced rapid credit growth, which conditioned the appreciation of the exchange rate. External imbalances and vulnerabilities built up. Countries experienced deterioration in their current accounts. This paper investigates the link between financial openness, real effective exchange rate, financial crisis and current account balance within the Panel Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) framework for 11 new European Union members during the period from 1999 to 2016. The results obtained by the use of pooled mean group estimator (PMG) show that in the long run, financial openness has a significant negative impact on the current account balance. In the short run, crisis significantly influences the current account balance having a positive sign.