International Integration and Resilience to Crisis in Transition Economies

Abstract:     
The world financial crisis of 2008 affected transition economies (including Eastern Europe and CIS members) in different ways depending on their previous growth patterns and forms of international integration. The sources of diversity have often been overlooked in views of transition as essentially a similar process across all countries. The approach here combines a balance sheet framework with a historical approach revealing the combinations of factors that led to outcomes in individual countries. Differences between countries are demonstrated with an analysis of their different forms of international integration. This is then used within a framework for analysing the effects of the world crisis on individual countries built around four distinct, but often overlapping, stages. The following sections set transition economies within this framework, showing how they differ from each other and the prospects this gives them for future recovery and growth. Impact in each stage is conditioned by the balance sheet situation of main economic actors - following a standard economic model of financial crisis - as shaped by the pre-crisis modes of growth. The analysis uses balance of payments statistics, the authors’ calculations from export statistics and other descriptive statistics on the development of the financial sector in transition countries. It builds also from an institutional analysis of individual economies. The comparative historical methodology is appropriate in view of constraints of a small-N research design of a very heterogeneous group of countries with high degrees of inter-correlation.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 29

Keywords: financial crisis, political economy, international integration, Eastern Europe, Russia, Commonwealth of Independent States, Central Asia

JEL Classification: F02, F21, F3, F32

working papers series