Do Finance and Trade Foster Economic Growth in the New EU Member States: Granger Panel Bootstrap Causality Approach

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether financial development and trade openness enhance economic growth in 11 new EU member states. While the overwhelming studies employ a simple measure of finance (credit to GDP ratio or stock market capitalization), we run growth regressions using a new IMF broad-based measure, which covers three dimensions of financial development: depth, access, and efficiency. We use a bootstrap panel-data approach based on seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) systems, which takes into account cross-sectional dependency and slope heterogeneity among countries. Such an approach gives separate regression coefficients for each country. The main findings are as follows: (1) the statistically significant unidirectional Granger causality from finance to economic growth is evidenced in five countries under examination (Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia); (2) trade openness is statistically significant Granger-cause of growth in six new EU member states (Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia); (3) the reverse causalities, i.e. running from growth to finance were found in two countries (Hungary and Slovenia), and from growth to trade openness in Croatia. The policy-oriented recommendation is that new EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe may gain pro-growth benefits from further finance and trade development, however, the policy-makers should be aware of possible nonlinearities and conditionality of these relationships.