16th Dubrovnik Economic Conference Symposium.
Wachtel, Paul ; Vujcic, Boris
The Croatian National Bank's 16th Annual Dubrovnik Economic
conference was held on 23-25 June 2010 and the 5th Annual Young
Economist's Seminar was held on the preceding day. The conference
has a well established tradition for the presentation of research on the
changing world economy and once again we are pleased to present some of
the papers in this symposium. Moreover, for the first time, our
symposium includes one of the papers presented at the Young
Economist's Seminar (YES), which provides an opportunity for young
Croatian economists to present their research to an international
audience. In this symposium we present three papers presented at the
conference, all of which address issues that relate to the Croatian
economy. All the papers were revised after the conference, refereed by
anonymous reviewers and evaluated by the symposium editors.
The first paper by Thorvaldur Gylfason and Eduard Hochreiter is a
comparison of the growth experiences in two related but very different
transition economies: Croatia and Latvia. Their case study of these two
countries provides an opportunity to understand the roles of capital
accumulation and capital efficiency in transition growth. The second
paper is by Ivana Herceg and Vedran Sosic, both of whom are on the staff
of the Croatian National Bank. Their topic is the household credit boom
that occurred in Croatia between 2005 and 2008, and they analyze the
extent to which it was driven by improvements in the creditworthiness of
borrowers as opposed to the relaxation of lending standards by banks.
Finally, the third paper is by two economists from the Institute of
Economics, Zagreb, Marina Tkalec and Maruska Vizek. They use
cointegration methods to analyze the purchasing power parity condition
for the Croatian economy.
The 16th Dubrovnik Economic Conference was organized by a
scientific committee chaired by Zeljko Rohatinski, the Governor of the
Croatian National Bank. The other committee members were Boris Vujcic,
Deputy Governor of the Croatian National Bank; 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 the symposium were: Zuzana Murgasova, Bostjan Jazbec,
Thorvaldur Gylfasson and Kenichi Ueda.
PAUL WACHTEL (1) & BORIS VUJCIC (2)
(1) Stern School of Business, New York University, 44 West 4th
Street, New York, NY 10012-1126, USA. E-mail: Pwachte[@stern.nyu.edu
(2) Croatian National Bank, Trg hrvatskih vetikana 3, Zagreb 10002,
Croatia. E-mail: bvujcic@hnb.hr
Comparative Economic Studies (2011) 53, 163-164. doi:
10.1057/ces.2011.15
