The System of Demand Equations in a State of Disequilibrium

Many of today's most significant socioeconomic problems, such as slower economic growth, the decline of some established industries, and shifts in patterns of foreign trade, are inter- or transnational in nature so that the intercountry comparative analyses of recent historical developments are necessary. The understanding of these processes and future prospects provides the focus for IIASA's project on Comparative Analysis of Economic Structure and Growth. Our research concentrates primarily on the empirical analysis of interregional and intertemporal economic structural change, on the sources of and constraints on economic growth, on problems of adaptation to sudden changes, and especially on problems arising from changing patterns of international trade, resource availability, and technology. This paper deals with the problem of econometric modeling of personal consumption expenditures under the conditions of disequilibria

Modelling economies in transition: an introduction

This paper considers the implications of structural breaks, such as have occurred in many transition economies, for econometric modelling based on the multivariate cointegration paradigm. It outlines recent developments on the identification of linear cointegrated systems, discusses some practical problems, and presents an extension to non-linear systems. This is followed by a discussion of the impact of structural breaks on the identification and estimation of such systems. Finally, it relates these issues to the other papers in this volume.

Intensity of Disequilibrium and Changes in Inventories

It is usually accepted in economic theory that one of the main reasons for keeping inventories is to balance supply and demand. However, the experiences of the recent years in Poland indicate that inventories play this role only in a limited way. The present paper is devoted to an interesting problem concerning the possibilities of using the changes of stocks of inventories as disequilibrium indicator for particular commodity markets. The analysis covers the changes of inventories in a socialized trade; the study, however, is of a more general character and the conclusions also apply to the inventories of finished products in enterprises, and to materials and semi-manufactured goods in the production process. The first part is an introduction into the problem of disequilibrium modeling. The changes of inventories in relation to the changes of market disequilibrium are analyzed in the second part. The third part contains a mathematical presentation of the above relationships and the proposal of building a model where the changes of inventories would serve as the disequilibrium indicator