توسعه مالی، فن آوری، رشد و عملکرد: شواهد از الحاق به اتحادیه اروپا

During the past two decades, many countries have embarked on a path of developing their financial markets, strengthening their technological base and stabilizing their economies. This paper finds that financial development and investment in information and communications technology (ICT) have significant positive impacts on GDP during macroeconomic structural reforms. We investigate eight Central and Eastern European countries that recently joined the EU. To secure macroeconomic stabilization, the countries have gone through privatization, harmonization and adjustments of the economies based on convergence criteria. Since some instruments are chosen based on the decision of the countries to satisfy the EU economic requirements, this unique experience along with a GMM methodology mitigates potential endogeneity problems. We estimate systems of simultaneous equations by GMM methods for GDP per capita, financial development and investment in telecommunications technology (TEL). We also find that financial development positively impacts TEL and that TEL weakly contributes to financial development.

During the past two decades, many countries around the world have embarked on a path of developing their financial markets, strengthening their technological base and establishing a more stable economic environment for businesses because these are crucial factors for economic prosperity. In this paper, we combine these factors and investigate the direction and simultaneity of the relations for eight Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that recently joined the European Union (EU). The main goal of the study is to analyze the impact of financial development and investment in information and communications technology (ICT) on the economy with a focus on emerging economies that have passed through a series of macroeconomic structural reforms, which highlights the uniqueness of our data set. Another goal of the paper is to assess the effect of initial stages of financial development on the host country's GDP and economic growth. The study captures initial stages of financial development using a financial development size measure starting in 1997, representing an early year when data is available for the sample countries. We can examine initial stages of financial development because the paper covers the early years of stock market establishment and banking sector deregulation of the CEE countries (Flier et al., 2001 and Romero-Avila, 2007). The development process of financial markets and institutions that took many decades for advanced economies is compressed to less than a decade for the eight transition economies. Moreover, using systems of equations allows us to link the development of the financial system with investment in telecommunications technology (TEL) and examine their relation with GDP per capita. An additional goal of the study, in line with Levine (1997), is to evaluate in details the technology channel in the theoretical approach to finance and economic growth within the context of emerging markets.

With this paper, we expand the existing knowledge on the determinants of financial development, technological progress and GDP. By deciding to join the EU and continuously working to satisfy the EU requirements, the eight emerging countries offer a unique evidence to investigate the impact of financial development, TEL and macroeconomic factors on GDP and economic growth. Fig. 2 shows a diagram of the main results of the paper. We find that financial development and ICT have significant positive impacts on GDP per capita in an environment of macroeconomic structural reforms. The second and most essential finding is that financial development contributes to TEL both directly and indirectly, and therefore is vital for building a solid telecommunications infrastructure. The results emphasize that more financially developed countries can build more extensive telecommunications networks, leading to higher investments in technology. We also find that TEL has a weak direct contribution to financial development and an indirect contribution through a higher GDP per capita. We demonstrate a positive bi-directional simultaneous relation between financial development and GDP per capita. Further, we find a two way positive relation between TEL and GDP per capita. The results imply that advanced technologies positively contribute to GDP per capita and that income is a key determinant for TEL.