F30 - International Finance: GeneralReturn

The purpose of this study is to investigate the sustainability of current account of 22 OECD countries by employing Liu and Tanner (1996) testing procedure. The procedure used here is to examine stationarity of current account. By using ADF unit root test on single time series, it has been found that current account of most OECD countries have unit root. This outcome, however, might be due to the generally low power of this test. The aim of this paper is to reconsider this issue by exploiting the extra information provided by the combination of the time-series and cross-sectional data and the subsequent power advantages of panel data unit root tests. We apply the test advocated by Im, Pesaran and Shin (1997). According to estimation, current account deficits in OECD countries are sustainable.

This paper examines sustainability of current account for Turkey during the period 1987:Q1 - 2002:Q4. Using the usual intertemporal borrowing constraint, I have tested for a long-run relationship between Turkey exports and imports (measured in real terms to real gross domestic product) using quarterly data. In my empirical analysis of the sustainability of current account for Turkey, cointegration approaches have been used. Empirical results suggest that there exists a unique long-run or equilibrium relationship among real exports and imports and their percentage to real GDP and their estimated cointegration factor (b) is very close to 1. The empirical findings suggest that the current account of Turkey is sustainable in the long-run.