Three Decades of Economic Development in Central and Eastern Europe. A Bayesian Approach to Quantifying Relevant Growth Factors

ABSTRACT

With 30 years passing in the transition of the Central and Eastern European countries toward market-based economies, this paper proposes a cross-country growth analysis to observe the most important factors contributing to these unique and historical developments. Specifically, we apply two cross-country growth models based on Bayesian Model Averaging methodology. The analysis outlines the importance of the labor force and the negative correlation between government spending and economic growth in the analyzed countries. These results have interesting implications for decision makers regarding potential policies aimed at promoting economic growth in the region.

KEYWORDS:

• Bayesian estimation
• central and Eastern Europe
• cross-country regression
• economic growth

JEL Classification:

• O1
• O4
• C11
• C30

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In Table 3 PIP denotes the posterior inclusion probabilities, Post Mean determines the posterior mean, Post S.D. is the posterior standard deviation of the coefficients and Cond. Pos. Sign is the ratio of how often in the model the coefficients expected values were positive (in the best case scenario when all the values were positive it is 1, we can see this case for consumption).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ștefan-Constantin Radu

Ștefan-Constantin Radu is Ph. D. student in economics at the School of Advanced Studies of the Romanian Academy. His research interests are related to: macroeconomics, mathematics applied in finance and econometrics.