Monetary policy shocks in the new EU members: a VAR approach

The article provides empirical evidence on the effects of monetary policy shocks in the three largest new European Union (EU) economies: Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Vector autoregression (VAR) system estimates show that the co-movement of macroeconomic variables, conditional on a monetary policy shock, is similar across these countries and, despite their lower degree of financial development, not dissimilar to that found for more advanced European economies. While qualitatively similar to the responses observed in the old EU members, the responses of the new members are, on average, weaker.