The paper provides insight into the relationship between foreign and domestic investment, and its effect on income distribution in the post-communist EU member states. The analysis is conducted using the general method of moment (GMM) estimator on panel data of the 10 Central and Eastern European (CEE) new member states from 1993-2017. The results reveal that a greater level of foreign direct investments (FDI) contributed to eliminating the negative effects of domestic investment on income distribution, particularly mass layoffs and the transfer of wealth into the hands of a small economic and political elite. It leads to the conclusion that FDI has played a significant role in reducing income inequality and rebuilding the middle class in the post-communist EU member states.

This paper provides an explanation of income dynamics in the posttransition EU countries from the perspective of institutional changes. As a result of seemingly-unrelated regressions analysis on panel data from 1990-2014, we find robust evidence of the relationship between income shares and institutional reforms. The impact of reforms on the top and below-average income shares is negative, whereas this effect on above above-average income share is positive. Decline of income share for the richest class during the post-transitional period can be attributed to the loss of privileges associated with the existence of an institutional vacuum in the first years of transition. Although transition increased wages for workers at the end of income distribution, the job losses had a stronger effect than wage increase, so the overall effect on income share of this group is negative. The winners of reforms appear as the workers with above-average income, whose skills are complementary to the changes instituted by transition to market economy and integration in the EU. [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 47010]

This paper analyzes the effect of the fiscal deficit on the current account deficit in the European Union during the period 1995-2018. The purpose is to examine to what extent an increase in government spending affects the deterioration of terms of trade and contributes to increasing external imbalances. Econometric methods for heterogeneous panel data models are used to analyse the existence of a long-run relationship between the fiscal deficit and the current account. The empirical findings indicate that the twin deficits hypothesis is not confirmed for the whole European Union, but only for a certain number of member states, where a long-run relationship still exists, confirming the impact of the fiscal deficit on the current account.

The sustainability of purchasing power parity (PPP) theory is examined within the quantile autoregression model for the monthly data of the euroand the US dollar-based real exchange rate (RER) in selected European economies (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Turkey). Period from January 2000 to December 2014 is covered. The application of quantile autoregression model is motivated by the necessity of identifying asymmetric behavior of the RER due to the shocks of different size and sign. The empirical results support to some extent the PPP theory for the euro-and US dollar-based RER in Romania, Serbia, and Turkey. The euro-based RER in Hungary and Poland is also identified to confirm the PPP theory. The dynamics of the RER in the Czech Republic cannot be associated with the PPP validity. The persistence of the euro-based RER is estimated to be more prominent after the depreciation shocks of smaller size.