Intertemporal current account sustainability in the presence of structural breaks

Abstract

We examined the hypothesis of current account sustainability in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Serbia. Our motivation for the research study has grown from the deficiency of similar kind of studies for these countries in the observed period. This is important because of the investigation of recent global crisis consequences. The backbone for the research can be found in Hakkio and Rush (1991) and Husted (1992). However, we employed different methodological tools with a purpose to include the possibility of structural breaks. The crucial idea is to empirically test current account sustainability through the concept of cointegration between export and import. In the last decades, substantial progress has been made in econometric modeling, which has shown that conclusions derived from standard tests can be inadequate in the presence of structural breaks. We want to check this hypothesis by application of new approaches. Unit root tests were applied on observed variables. After that, Gregory-Hansen approach was employed with purpose of cointegration presence testing. Finally, we estimated cointegration vectors. The main finding of the research study is that there is some form of the current account sustainability in all of the observed countries. In Czech Republic and Hungary, it is stronger, while in Poland and Serbia it is weak. Therefore, policymakers have to significantly improve competitiveness with the purpose of strengthening external stability. This paper extends current literature, since new methodological frameworks are used and new countries or new period samples were analyzed.