The impact of the trade and financial openness on the economic growth in the countries from the Eastern Europe

Abstract

The impact of trade and financial openness can be measured by the sensitivity of the first moment of the economic growth. Taking into account the domestic conditions, this paper provides an empirical evaluation of the impact of globalization on the economic growth in the Eastern Europe. The data set includes a sample of 9 countries from the Eastern Europe, which are member states of the EU. This paper investigates the possibility of a non-monotonic relationship between the trade/financial openness and the economic growth. The analysis of non-linearity is done by allowing the effects of trade/financial integration to vary with the general level of economic development. The econometric models used in the analysis are the dynamic panel data models: the “Difference” GMM (Arellano-Bond (1991)) and the “System” GMM (Arellano-Bover(1995)/Blundell-Bond(1998)). These models are designed for a dynamic persistent panel data with few time periods and many individuals, with endogenous regressors, with fixed effect, with heteroskedasticity and auto-correlation within cross-sections. The main conclusions of this paper are that trade openness has a significant positive impact on the economic growth while the impact of the financial integration is a negative one. This analysis reveals a strong non-linearity of the impact of trade openness on the economic growth. The non-linearity of the financial openness impact on the economic growth couldn’t be deduced.financial openness, economic growth