Wg^Z[^c\ cdiZ NEW EUROPE AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS By Katinka Barysch
★ The EU’s new member-states have been severely hit by the credit crunch and collapsing export markets. Many had left themselves vulnerable through fiscal profligacy, lending booms and gaping external deficits. ★ Most rich countries in the EU are boosting fiscal spending to mitigate the downturn. But some of the new members are being forced to cut budgets by IMF emergency programmes. In the others, higher public spending cannot make up for falling export demand. ★ The immediate feeling of helplessness of the Central and East Europeans is compounded by a more profound sense that their post-Cold War growth model is broken. The ingredients of past success – opening up to trade and investment and selling local banks to West European ones – has left these countries vulnerable. The EU, which acted as an anchor for reforms in the past, has lost clout and credibility. ★ The new member-states have no time for procrastination or recrimination. Faced with the near-term challenges of ageing populations, fierce global competition and tougher green targets, they need to improve, not discard, their economic model of liberalisation and integration. But they will need the EU’s help.
Many parts of the world claim to have been particularly badly affected by the economic crisis, but that is truer for Central and Eastern Europe than most regions. Until the early autumn of 2008, analysts were still listing reasons why the EU’s new member-states would remain relatively resilient: sound macro-economic management, membership in the EU and (for some) in the euro, solid, low-cost manufacturing sectors, and financial systems that had focused on the basic business of lending to consumers and companies. ‘Decoupling’ remained a fashionable theory in Eastern Europe well into the second half of 2008. However, in August and September bad news started to trickle in. By October, Hungary had to call in the IMF to avert a currency crisis. Latvia quickly followed. Bulgaria, Lithuania and Romania may yet require help. (Outside the EU, the IMF had to assist Belarus, the Kyrgyz Republic, Serbia and Ukraine but this paper will focus on those Central and East European countries that are EU members.) The severity with which the global financial and economic crisis hit many Central and East European (CEE) countries took most people by surprise. Until mid-2008, investors assumed that these fast-growing countries were firmly on a ‘convergence’ path towards West European income levels. Policy-makers from Tallinn to Bucharest were struggling with the consequences of economic overheating: rising inflation, asset bubbles and strengthening currencies. Within a matter of weeks, the focus shifted towards preventing currencies from collapsing and mitigating the ferocity of the economic downturn. The region’s economies are, of course, very different. But since late 2008, there has been a strong perception that ‘Eastern Europe’ as a whole is in deep trouble. Like everywhere else in the world, policy-makers, economists and businesspeople in this region have become obsessed with the question of how bad it is going to get. The outlook has been darkening quickly. At a Euromoney conference in Vienna in January, several East European central bank governors refused to discuss their governments’ official forecast because they were “more than a month old” and hence
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