E22 - Investment; Capital; Intangible Capital; CapacityReturn

This study estimates the impact of public debt on public investment in Central and Eastern European (CEE) economies. We implement Cross-sectionally Augmented Autoregressive Distributed Lag (CS-ARDL) model, which effectively handles cross-sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity, while dealing with short- and long-run coefficients simultaneously. The results indicate the existence of both short- and long-term crowding out effects of public debt on public investment in the CEE region. These findings have significant fiscal policy repercussions, particularly in context marked by constrained financial resources and substantial debt loads, as has been the case in a number of CEE economies.

We examine the growth effects of public and private investment by using data for a large sample of countries. For the full sample, our dynamic panel estimations indicate that both public and private investment have strong positive effects on growth. Our estimations for income levels also show that the impacts of both public and private investment are positive and statistically significant for developing countries. Interestingly, public and private investment promote growth in developing countries with effective and ineffective governments. It seems that countries can significantly benefit from investment regardless of their institutional quality levels. Furthermore, the effect of public investment generally appears to be larger than that of private investment. Given the robust relationship between investment and growth in both ineffective and effective developing countries, an important policy implication of our study is that both types of investment should be encouraged to foster economic growth.

Based on the AMSZ (1989) criterion, we exploit comprehensive datasets to estimate the dynamic efficiency of world economy. The results reveal that the representative econo-mies conform to a "U-shaped pattern" in their evolution of capital accumulation. That is, a period of decreasing efficiency (over-accumulation) followed by increasing efficiency (de-accumulation). Contrary to previous evidence, the bias-corrected estimates show that major economies have been inconsistently dynamically efficient. As a prime example, China today is unquestionably in a state of severe dynamic inefficiency, and the inefficient status is likely to continue in near future. We also document the limitations of the AMSZ criterion and point out promising research directions in the efficiency literature.

In this article we analyse the impact of the interaction between cross-border mergers and acquisitions and the quality of the institutional setting on domestic investment using panel data for 22 European transition countries from 2000 to 2014. We investigate whether the progress and durability of institutional reforms have a crucial influence on the economic performance of cross-border mergers and acquisitions in transition countries. Our empirical findings indicate that contemporaneous cross-border mergers and acquisitions have a crowding-out effect on domestic investment in the year of merger or acquisition, but the influence of their lagged level has a strong crowding-in effect one year later. We find that the overall quality of the institutional setting and the rule of law negatively and significantly affect the relation between this type of foreign direct investment and domestic investment, both in the short and long run. Political stability exhibits a positive and significant impact on domestic investment in the current period and over time.

The paper investigates how results obtained with standard CGE models can be improved by incorporating the effects of R&D activity in a recursively-dynamic CGE model built for the economy of the Czech Republic. The main objective of the paper is to quantify the impact of R&D activity on the long-term economic growth of the Czech Republic within the recursively dynamic CGE framework. The effect of R&D investment is modelled via the accumulation of knowledge that is treated as a specific production factor. The main findings show that knowledge accumulation can contribute to higher economic growth, but the impact of the dynamisation in the CGE model is very low. However, in terms of structural changes in the economy, the omission of knowledge capitalization might underestimate the tertiary sector in the longer run. The paper also investigates the efficiency of R&D investment and concludes that in the longer run, investment in capital goods is more efficient in achieving higher economic growth. In the concluding chapter, related factors that may improve the impact of knowledge in the CGE model are discussed.