Crises Effects on Financial System Structure in some Post-Communist Countries

Abstract

Developing countries had been affected by the crisis started in the developed countries, characterized by lower growth, higher unemployment and poverty, and changes in inequality, but several channels had affected also emerging countries differently, depending on the extent to which they are vulnerable to particular channels. Major emerging economies from Central and Eastern Europe are post-communist countries that faced transition after adopting market-based economy. All former socialist countries were characterized by an early transition recession transformation result of the restructuring, loss of markets, tough competition from foreign products, best quality, or in other cases cheaper. As regards Romania's status in the context of transition, we may say that it bears the characteristics determined by the situation inherited from the centralized economy and the options of political forces after 1989. The starting point was unfavorable both from an economic perspective, but also social, economic inefficiency due to the existence of industrial projects and sometimes senseless economic, profound structural economic imbalances, sizing of industries and alarming social indicators. In first part, present paper wants to express the role of financial system structure during transition and crises, estimating the effects on a sample of five post-communist countries. We take into discussion data that reflects representative mutations and some restructuring in Central and Eastern European countries, such Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania. For all countries we show some important changes of financial system during transition and construct an image matrix that illustrate important indicators of financial system structure and their adjustment. We use data based on Thorston Beck IMF Database (Beck T., WorldBank). In second part of the paper we show some major transmission channels of crisis and some possible effects on post-communist countries, described in economic literature. The analyze uses tables and graphical interpretation. In the last part of the paper we present some OLS estimators of the major factors identified as transmission channels using a dataset from EBRD databases.