Petru Ovidiu Mura

Government debt has increased not only in times of economic stress, but it has become a com- mon manifestation of government expenditure funding. The aim of the paper is to inspect the effect of government debt on economic freedom in ten CEE c...

The aim of the present paper is to analyse the effects of digitalisation on economic growth in the European Union. An econometric model with balanced panel data is used, with the analysis spanning over a 22-year time frame from 2000 to 2021. The main conclusion is that digitalisation generates a positive and significant impact on economic growth, even when several control variables are taken into consideration. The results prove their robustness, which is backed by the employment of the DESI as an independent variable. This paper contributes to the existing empirical analyses by extending the research on digitalisation to the entire EU, and separately for the old EU-15 member states and EU-13 new member states since, to our best knowledge, the existing literature has not approached the subject in this manner. As a policy recommendation, we suggest that public decision-makers take measures that support more harmonised digitalisation policies, favouring the new business model based on digitalisation.

The paper investigates whether there is a convergence club stance for the Visegrad countries plus Romania and Bulgaria and the part played, in this process, by the implicit tax rates on labour and consumption, respectively. For the purpose of the research, the GDP per capita, productivity and unemployment are used as convergence indicators and dependent variables. The dataset covers the 1995–2016 timeframe and the analysis is based on a panel-model approach. The main results show that the implicit tax on labour has no significant effect on the convergence indicators while the implicit rates on consumption are statistically significant with negative influence. The interpretation of results is made considering a set of control and robustness variables where policy lessons derive from. The conclusion reflects on the policy lessons that can serve to accomplish the convergence club within selected CEE countries: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Romania.