جهانی شدن و رشد اقتصادی: شواهدی از دو دهه انتقال در CEE

This paper examines the role of various aspects of globalization for economic growth in ten CEE economies. In contrary to previous papers, we restrict our analysis solely to the first two decades of transition. Using the globalization indexes published by the Swiss Economic Institute, we found strong and robust evidence of growth-stimulating effect of globalization processes, especially in social and economic dimensions. On the other hand, the role of political dimension of globalization was not found to be statistically significant in any research variant. The result, which seems to be particularly interesting, is that the development of the internet, television and trade in newspapers (the social dimension of globalization) had at least as strong positive impact on economic development in CEE economies in the first two decades of transition as the rise in international trade, growth of foreign investment, reduction of import barriers and development of a tax policy (the economic dimension).

Globalization is usually thought of as a process of unification of goods and capital markets across the world in which barriers to international trade and foreign investment are reduced. Globalization can be caused either by technological progress which reduces transport costs and improves information flows or by economic and policy changes focused on reduction of protectionism, liberalization of foreign investment and migration rules. There are many studies which have been focused on the impact of globalization on the growth of output in the long run. In the economic theory the long-run growth rate is usually identified with so-called steady state growth rate (for short SSGR). In general, previous investigations were performed by means of two types of methods. At the very beginning, the growth equations with relatively large cross-sectional dimensions were estimated and interpreted. The second group of methods got popular mainly due to improved software packages, availability of longer time series and development of panel data methods with higher time series dimensions. It is usually stressed that globalization processes are especially important in the case of developing and transition economies. Thus, it is not surprising that discussion on the role of globalization in the development of CCE economies in transition has gained considerable attention in recent years. However, the rising interest in conducting research on this particular group of countries has primarily focused on theoretical deliberations, while clearly less attention has been paid to rigorous empirical studies. In general, the motivation to analyse the dynamic links between globalization and growth in GDP in the case of new EU member countries in transition from the CEE region is twofold. First, despite the common opinions one cannot forget that globalization brings not only a chance to develop but it also implies some new challenges and risks. Since integration with global markets leads to increased competition it is not obvious whether an economy will significantly benefit from rapid globalization.2 The latter is especially important in the case of CEE transition economies which are not experienced in dealing with various aspects of globalization. Therefore, detailed empirical analyses are required to precisely assess the growth effects of globalization, which in turn is crucial for further decision-making. Second, to the best of our knowledge, in the literature there are also no detailed analyses devoted to the links between economic growth and globalization for the group of CEE economies in transition, which would use the most recent and comprehensive data along with carefully selected econometric methods. The available literature has not given a full picture of growth-globalization links in CEE economies in transition so far, as most of the previous papers have been based solely on economic aspects of globalization (e.g. trade openness, foreign direct investment) while other dimensions of globalization (e.g. social or political) have been rather marginalized. Moreover, the globalization-growth links in this group of countries with restriction to only the transition period have not been examined in detail so far.3 It is without question that from the very beginning of the transition the structure of these relationships started to evolve dynamically as the CEE economies began to operate on global markets without hindrance and limitations. This way our paper fills the gap in the existing literature by providing an extensive analysis of the impact of various forms of globalization on economic growth which is focused solely on the period of transition in CEE. Another important point that distinguishes our paper from other contributions on globalization and economic growth is that we employed a set of comprehensive measures of globalization instead of using only one specific measure. Such an approach allows us to analyse many aspects of globalization processes. Moreover, to test the stability of our empirical results and formulate reliable conclusions we focus on few hundred different specifications of growth models. At this place it is worth to mention that previous studies on globalization often present quite different results concerning the real impact of globalization on economic growth. The contributors stress two main reasons for these differences. The first one underlines the fact that the definition of a relevant measure of globalization is difficult to formulate, because a reliable aggregate indicator should be based on many economic, political and social variables. Secondly, there is no unique view on how the output equation should be formulated to efficiently assess the impact of globalization on the long-run rate of growth of output or the SSGR. Since globalization is not easy to measure, the definition of an overall index of globalization is the most important step in the process of quantification of its sources and effects. Some comprehensive measures of globalization were developed by means of the weighted average or the principal component methods.4 In this paper we will focus on detailed analysis of the index of globalization calculated by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute.5 This measure of globalization, currently considered as the most comprehensive one, was developed by Dreher (2006). It is also based on the principal component method. This index is aimed to combine several variables not only from the economic sphere, but also from the political and social ones. In this indicator the economic part is weighted by around 37%, political dimension by around 26% and social aspect by around 37%. The globalization index is updated annually for 208 countries.6 The proper choice of model specification is also important to assess the growth effects of other variables, like education and public expenditure on infrastructure, investment ratio, aid, foreign direct investment, financial reforms, etc. Commenting on the state of literature, Rodriguez and Rodrik (2001) stressed that many measures of openness (often treated as synonyms of globalization) are flawed.7 This is especially misleading in case of studies which conclude that openness significantly improves growth, nevertheless the fact that the econometrics applied is oversimplified and therefore hardly leads to any reliable conclusions.8 Therefore, conducting the empirical analysis in as comprehensive way as possible (e.g. by considering multiple variants of the econometric model) is one of the main goals of our research. The content of this paper is as follows. Section 2 reviews the most important contributions concerning the impact of globalization on economic growth. Special attention is given to CEE economies in transition. Section 3 is concerned with a presentation of the dataset. Section 4 presents main research hypotheses examined in this paper. In Section 5 the discussion of methodological questions in respect to the specification and estimation is showed. Empirical results and their discussion are provided in Section 6. Finally, in Section 7 we summarize the major conclusions and suggest directions for future research.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first contribution which analysed the role of various aspects of globalization for economic growth in CEE economies in transition. The results of this paper confirmed a positive role of expanding globalization on GDP growth in the CEE region. This positive impact was found to be especially strong and robust for social and economic aspects of globalization. On the other hand, the empirical results provided solid evidence against any impact of political globalization on growth of the output in case of examined economies. These results are not surprising if we once again look at the definitions of the globalization indexes examined in this paper and recent history of transition in the CEE region. Social aspects of globalization cover personal contacts, cultural proximity and information flows. The latter sphere, which refers to the development of the internet, television and trade in newspapers, turned out to have an especially strong impact on economic growth. Similarly, economic globalization, which consists of actual flows of capital and labour and trade restrictions, also occurred to be a statistically significant growth factor. This result is also not surprising as this sub-index covers trade, foreign investment (actual flows), reduction of import barriers, and development of a tax policy (restrictions). On the other hand, insignificance of political globalization may be easily justified by the fact that this sub-index covers the number of embassies, membership in international organizations or international treaties. Political transformation in Central and Eastern Europe was rather revolutionary, not evolutionary. The main political reforms in these countries (change from totalitarian system to democracy) were conducted at the very beginning of the transition process within a relatively short period of time. This most likely caused that the data could not reflect the impact of political reforms on economic growth in CEE region. The most important policy implication resulting from our research is that globalization in the CEE region led to economic growth during the first two decades of transition. This implies that policymakers in this region should facilitate globalization as it clearly does more good than harm to the economic development of CEE economies in transition. Results presented in this paper prove that globalization allowed new EU members in transition to use their potential in a more efficient way, which could not take place during the era of centrally planned economies. The fact, which seems to be particularly interesting, is that the results of our study confirmed that the development of the internet, television and trade in newspapers (the social dimension of globalization) had at least as strong positive impact on economic development in CEE economies in the first two decades of transition as the rise in international trade, growth of foreign investment, reduction of import barriers and development of a tax policy (the economic dimension). The importance of information flows in stimulating economic growth and convergence of income levels and standards of life among member countries has also been reflected in EU's official documents and budget plans, e.g. the Financial Framework 2014–2020.25 One of the fundamentals of this financial perspective is to provide common and easy access to the internet, especially in catching-up EU member states in transition. The outcomes of the formal empirical analysis conducted in this paper confirmed the appropriateness of this specific aspect of EU's regional policy. It is likely that some aspects of globalization-growth linkages were not discovered in our study because of insufficient variation in the (small) data sample available. An important issue is related with the re-examining of the role of globalization when relevant time series become long enough to conduct a detailed analysis individually for each CEE transition economy. This would significantly supplement the results presented in this paper. Secondly, in the light of the discussed topic the impact of globalization on economic growth in the period of financial crises is also an important research avenue. This, however, requires more post-crisis data to be available. To summarize, although many important research problems have already been deeply examined, the link between globalization and economic growth in the case of CEE economies in transition still deserves the attention of researchers as some questions remain unanswered.