Real Exchange Rates in Central and Eastern Europe: What Scope for the Underlying Fundamentals?

The aim of this paper is to study the fundamental macroeconomic determinants of both the CPI and the PPI-based real effective exchange rate in 5 selected acceding countries from central and eastern Europe, i.e. the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. The paper is based on the combination of two approaches widely used for transition economies, namely the Behavioral Equilibrium Exchange Rate (BEER) and the structural VAR. Indeed, a cointegration approach is adopted and the estimated VECM model attempts to connect in a structural way the real effective exchange rate to labor productivity, the relative price of non-tradable goods, public deficit and the current account position. Impulse response functions are subsequently employed to investigate how shock in the underlying fundamentals impact on the effective real exchange rates.