The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) expects GDP in Central, East and Southeast Europe (CESEE) to pick up speed and grow on average by 2-3% over the forecast period 2014-2016 a major driving force rooted in an upward reversal of public and private investment. The...

Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010), a pioneering mathematician, created a new awareness of the chaos of nature - its randomness, irregular shapes, sharp edges, corners, and gaps. He developed the theory of fractals to describe these phenomena, and he also applied his concepts to financial markets....

Economic models are the tools of decision makers in governments and central banks. As such, they affect our everyday lives. But what is the actual track record of these models, and do they really work? Applying them in real time and validating them on a day-by-day basis leads to a clear...

In the past decades, there has been an unprecedented increase in cross border transactions between countries in terms of goods and financial flows. This integration has been fuelled by search of lower risk investments, risk diversification, search for cost effective and more efficient factors of...

We develop the concept of “dragon-kings” corresponding to meaningful outliers, which are found to coexist with power laws in the distributions of event sizes under a broad range of conditions in a large variety of systems. These dragon-kings reveal the existence of mechanisms of...

This paper aims to extend the existing literature on foreign exchange rate risk pricing. Unlike the existing studies on Canada, we use six alternative bilateral and one multilateral exchange rate proxies. Furthermore, using both a two-factor and a three-factor capital asset pricing model (CAPM),...

External determinants Two key factors currently affect the economic prospects of CESEE the crisis in the euro area and movements in the commodity prices. For Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine declining world market prices of energy carriers, steel and other basic commodities are vital. For most of...

Summary The protracted recession in the euro area will continue to be a drag on the economic growth of most CESEE countries in 2013. By and large, those countries are small open economies held hostage to the excessive fiscal austerity pursued in the euro area and the sluggish progress on the...

(Reprint from WIFO-Monatsberichte, Vol. 86, No. 5, May 2013) Zusammenfassung Wachstumsbeschleunigung dank Investitionswende in Mittel-, Ost- und Südosteuropa Das Wirtschaftswachstum wird sich in den mittel-, ost- und südosteuropäischen Ländern 2014 bis 2016 verstärken und durchschnittlich...