The impact of external shocks on economic growth: An empirical study based on the SVAR models

Abstract

Abstract The paper contains a series of complex analyses on the study of typologies of economic crises and can bring a significant contribution to the literature in determining the effects of external factors on economic growth, taking into account the distinct characteristics of the periods of decline. The work includes Hodrick-Prescott filtering techniques for characterizing business cycles in three Central and Eastern European countries and the Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) technique is used to analyze the impact of external shocks on economic growth over two distinct time-horizons. External shocks such as external debt, external interest rate, external output, producer price index and real interest rate were taken into account. For each economy analyzed, the impact of the two types of economic crisis was observed, namely financial crisis and health crisis, and two time-horizons were defined for each complete economic cycle. Over these two time-horizons, the impact of external shocks on economic growth has been assessed. There has been a general decrease in the effects of shocks in the second time-horizon, in which the most severe values of economic growth are associated with the health crisis, compared to the time-horizon associated with the financial crisis. It has also been observed that, in the case of both Hungary and Romania, the responses of economic growth to external shocks are faster compared to the Czech economy. Moreover, external production is the factor that explains most of the variance in the economic growth rate in the first time-horizon, while in the second, one of the most influential indicators is the external production price index, which has been severely affected by the slowdown in the global production process.