Voting power methodology offers insights to understand coalition building in collective decision making. This paper proposes a new measure of voting power inspired from Banzhaf (1965) accounting for the proximity between voters by capturing how often they appear in winning coalitions together. Using this proximity index, we introduce a notion of relative linkages among coalition participants as determinant of coalition building. We propose an application to the governance structure of the International Monetary Fund, with linkages being represented by bilateral volumes of trade between voters. The results are able to explain several important features of the functioning of this particular voting body, and may be useful for other applications in international politics.
This study examines the causal links between improvements in economic freedom and changes in GDP per capita of new EU members in transition in the period 2000‒2009. The empirical results suggest significant causality running from changes in monetary and fiscal freedom, trade openness, regulation of credit, labour, and business, legal structure and security of property rights, and access to sound money to movements in GDP per capita, especially in less and moderately developed CEE transition countries. Moreover, we find evidence that improvements in economic freedom are one of the main factors stimulating the convergence of these economies towards rich EU members. The evidence of causality in the opposite direction is much weaker.
The concept of cointegration that enables the proper statistical analysis of long-run comovements between unit root processes has been of great interest to numerous economic investigators since it was introduced. However, investigation of short-run comovement between economic time series seems equally important, especially for economic decision-makers. The concept of common features and based on it the idea of two additional reduced rank structure forms in a VEC model (the strong and the weak one) may be of some help. The strong form reduced rank structure (SF) takes place when at least one linear combination of the first differences of the variables exists, which is white noise. However, when this assumption seems too strong, the weaker case can be considered. The weak form appears when the linear combination of first differences adjusted for long-run efects exists, which is white noise.
The main focus of this paper is a Bayesian analysis of the VEC models involving the weak form of reduced rank restrictions.
After the introduction and discussion of the said Bayesian model, the presented methods will be illustrated by an empirical investigation of the price – wage spiral in the Polish economy.
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