17th Dubrovnik Economic Conference symposium.

Wachtel, Paul ; Vujcic, Boris

The Croatian National Bank's 17th Annual Dubrovnik Economic Conference was held on 29 June-2 July 2011 and a Young Economists' Seminar (YES) was held on the preceding day. The conference and seminar have a well-established tradition for the presentation of research on the changing world economy and once again we are pleased to publish some of the papers. In this Symposium, we present four papers presented at the conference, all of which address issues of particular importance to the EU accession countries including Croatia, which will formally enter the EU next year. All the papers were revised after the conference, refereed by anonymous reviewers and evaluated by the symposium editors.

The first paper is by Tomislav Galac and Evan Kraft, members of the staff of the Croatain National Bank. They discuss the Euroization of the Croatian banking system during the crisis years. The Bank's policies to mitigate the effects of the crisis are analyzed. The next paper by Peter Haiss and Wolfgang Rainer also analyzes Euroization. Their interest is credit Euroization in the Eastern European countries. Foreign currency lending and deposit taking is closely related to the topic of the third paper, cross border bank flows. Ursula Vogel and Adalbert Winkler analyze the effect on domestic lending during the crisis of cross border flows from foreign banks. The last paper by Reiner Martin and Julia Worz examines the relationship between competition and inflation in the region.

The 17th Dubrovnik Economic Conference was organized by a scientific committee chaired by Zeljko Rohatinski, who was the Governor of the Croatian National Bank. The other committee members were Boris Vujcic then Deputy Governor of the Croatian National Bank who became Governor in July 2012, Paul Wachtel, Professor of Economics at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, Randall K Filer, Professor of Economics at Hunter College of the City University of New York and at CERGE-EI, Prague and Oleh Havrylyshyn, Visiting Scholar, Toronto University. The selection committee for the YES consisted of Randall K Filer, Oleh Havrylyshyn and Paul Wachtel. In addition, the success of the conference owes much to the efforts of Tomislav Presecan, Vice Governor of the Croatian National Bank and Chairman of the organizing committee.

The full conference program and the papers not included in this Symposium can be found on the Croatian National Bank web site (http://www.hnb.hr/). Conference papers benefited from comments from the conference discussants and participants. We are grateful to the anonymous referees and our discussants. The discussants in Dubrovnik for the papers in this Symposium were: Marko Skreb, Neven Mates, Oleh Havrylyshyn and Ricardo Lago.

doi: 10.1057/ces.2012.30

PAUL WACHTEL (1) & BORIS VUJCIC (2)

(1) Stern School of Business, New York University, 44 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012-1126, USA.

(2) Croatian National Bank, Trg hrvatskih velikana 3, Zagreb 10002, Croatia.