The Ease of Trade Imbalances Within the Euro Area After the 2008 Recession

Marcus Scheiblecker

No 453, WIFO Working Papers from WIFO

Abstract: Right from the start of the European currency union, trade imbalances could be observed in the current accounts and trade balances of the euro countries. The business cycle upswing reaching into 2008 and the strong inflow of cheap money led to a strong economic expansion especially in the periphery of the euro area. Traditionally abundant wage increases in these countries persisted. In the more export oriented economies in the core of the euro area, however, hardly any wage increases could be observed due to the lacklustre internal demand. As a consequence, those countries gained further in competitiveness in comparison to the periphery. This led to an increase in foreign trade imbalances. With the sharp drop of economic activity in 2008 and the swift dry-up of cheap financial means this process was interrupted. Since, labour unit costs of Spain, Portugal and Greece evolved much more muted than the average of the euro area. As a result, imports of those countries stagnated while exports increased at the same time which led to a nearly balanced external trade in 2012.

Keywords: External; imbalances; Euro; area; Current; account (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2013-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-int, nep-mac and nep-opm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.wifo.ac.at/wwa/pubid/46933 abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wfo:wpaper:y:2013:i:453

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in WIFO Working Papers from WIFO Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Florian Mayr ().