Volume 7 (2018): Issue 2 (May 2018)

The first central banks were founded in the XVII century and monetary policy has been evolving ever since. Knowledge on monetary economy has improved significantly over the last couple of decades and a consensus has been reached in a number of areas. As a result, hyperinflations have been extremely rare over the past decades.

The global financial crisis challenged traditional monetary policy that was based on the approach involving one instrument (reference interest rate) and one goal (price stability). It is obvious that we need a new approach to monetary policy and I believe that changes will happen gradually in the future.

This paper consists of two parts. The first part covers the traditional monetary policy and deals with issues where consensus has been reached, as well as with issues on monetary policy objectives, transparency, and macroprudential policy.

The second part addresses the issues that pose a challenge for monetary policy and for which there is no complete consensus. This part elaborates on the dilemma involving rules versus discretions, a new approach to banking supervision, monetary policy during a crisis, the role of econometric models, and the need for international coordination of monetary policy.

This paper attempts to empirically assess the impact of the ECB’s quantitative easing policy on capital flows in the countries of the Central and South Eastern region. Given the tight trade and financial linkages of the region with the euro area, one should expect that the buoyant liquidity provided by the ECB might affect the size of the capital inflows. We test this hypothesis by employing panel estimation on a sample of 14 countries CESEE countries for the 2003-2015 period. Contrary to the expected outcome, the results reveal either negative or insignificant impact of the change in the ECB balance sheet on the different types of capital inflows. The results suggest that the magnitude of the crisis, to which the ECB responded to was immense, hence precluding any significant impact of the monetary easing on capital flows in the region. The inclusion of a dummy in the model, to control for the 2008 crisis confirms the findings from the first specification and also does not change the finding on the ECB quantitative easing impact on the capital flows. The impact of the crisis dummy on capital flows is negative and it holds for almost all types of capital inflows, except for the government debt flows, which is consistent with the countercyclical fiscal policies and rising public debt after the crisis.

The aim of this paper is to analyze controversies of modern macroeconomic theories in the period of the global economic crisis. Ideas, disagreement and similarities between the most important theories in relation to state intervention and anti-crisis economic policy are presented. The topical research has found a connection between the roots of the global economic crisis and the paradigm of new liberal theories. The crisis has confirmed that the idea of self-regulation in the private sector is untenable in practice. In times of crisis, the leading theoretical framework in economic policy is reexamined. Rules-based monetary and fiscal policies are replaced by discretionary decision-making. In the world economies affected by the crisis, anti-Keynesian cyclical measures of monetary and fiscal policies were implemented. A comprehensive and unequivocal reaffirmation of Keynesianism in anti-crisis policies has confirmed the assumption of the circularity of economic theories. Central banks quickly reduced their key interest rates and increased their money supply. Fiscal authorities implemented expansive stimulus programs. When creating a new macroeconomic paradigm, market imperfection must be taken into account as well as a limited range of government economic policies.

A medium-scale nonlinear dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model was estimated (54 variables, 29 state variables, 7 observed variables). The model includes an observed variable for stock market returns. The root-mean square error (RMSE) of the in-sample and out-of-sample forecasts was calculated. The nonlinear DSGE model with measurement errors outperforms AR (1), VAR (1) and the linearised DSGE in terms of the quality of the out-of-sample forecasts. The nonlinear DSGE model without measurement errors is of a quality equal to that of the linearised DSGE model.

Deindustrialization is a dynamic process that began to attract the attention of economic theorists in the 60s of the 20th century, which is characterized by a reduction in the share of the industrial sector in GDP and employment. A descriptive analysis of the deindustrialization process in Montenegro was carried out. It was established that throughout the observed period, the process of deindustrialization in Montenegro has characteristics present in developed countries. However, a deeper analysis and taking into account the key indicators showed that deindustrialization in Montenegro did not just arise as a sole consequence of positive economic trends. In addition, the entire process took place under the influence of various non-economic indicators. Moreover, the global economic crisis had a significant economic impact on Montenegro's industrial sector. In the process of accession to the EU and in addressing global challenges, the country's industrial sector, in line with key development strategies, is heading towards reindustrialization, i.e. development and progress under changing conditions.

This paper aims to survey the existing literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the relationship between monetary policy and economic growth. While there has been a wide range of studies on the existing relationship between monetary policy and economic growth, the nexus between the two remains inconclusive. This paper takes a comprehensive view of the theoretical evolution of the relationship and the respective recent empirical findings. Overall, this paper shows that the majority of findings support the relevancy of monetary policy in supporting economic growth, mainly in financially developed economies with fairly independent central banks. The relationship tends to be weaker in developing economies with structural weaknesses and underdeveloped financial markets that are weakly integrated into global markets. This paper concludes that monetary policy matters for growth both in the short-run and long-run despite the prevailing ambiguous relationship. The paper recommends intensive financial development measure for developing countries as well as structural reforms to address to supply side deficiencies.

The paper substantiates the need to consider economic efficiency indicators of bank activity as fuzzy quantities. Formulations of the problem of fuzzy regression analysis and modelling, available in literary sources, have been analyzed. Three main approaches to the fuzzy regression analysis are presented. The general mathematical and meaningful formulation of problem of a fuzzy multivariate regression analysis for commercial bank competitiveness has been proposed. Sequence of its solutions is described. The example of numerical computations for one of the large Ukrainian banks is given. Results of obtained solution were analyzed from the standpoint of reliability, accuracy and compared against the classical crisp regression analysis. Finishing steps for obtaining final accurate numerical results of solution process are described. In summary, convincing arguments concerning the expediency of application of this approach to the problem of determining the competitiveness of banks are formulated and presented.

The purpose of this paper is to determine potential indicators of systemic banking crises in five Southeast European countries. Although signal horizon in the literature usually implies a period of 12 months before and 12 months after a crisis outbreak, models in this paper imply a 24-month pre-crisis period. Probability of a banking crisis occurrence is calculated using logit regression. Results have shown that banking system indicators have higher impact on probability of systemic banking crisis occurrence compared to macroeconomic indicators, and that the banking systems of these countries are significantly exposed to global trends.

Western Balkan (WB) countries have a clear orientation towards the European Union (EU), all of them currently being candidate or potential candidate countries. Moreover, the EU is an important trading partner of the WB economies, therefore, there is a recognizable need for convergence of this region towards the EU economy. The real convergence is a rather slow process and the WB region is still lagging behind the EU. This paper explores the catch up of the WB region during the global crisis that severely hit the EU economy, trying to identify potential changes in the convergence pace. In addition, this work makes a joint overview of the nominal and real convergence processes as well as the convergence of the general macroeconomic indicators of the WB countries to the EU, taking them as complementary and mutually self-supporting processes.

In this study, we aim to investigate the relationship between interest rate and inflation rate in the context of the Fisher effect hypothesis for Fragile five economies. In this regard, we employ recently developed panel co-integration and panel causality test methods. The bi-directional causal relation between interest rate and inflation rate exists only in Brazil and Indonesia. On the other hand, there is no causation linkage in India. Results imply that Fisher effect exists only in Brazil and Indonesia.