Integration of the Financial Markets of the New Member States of the EU

The subject of the thesis is the integration of financial markets of the new member states of the European Union (hereinafter referred to as the NMS). According to the standard economic theory, the process of financial integration should be associated with several positive effects, among others a) the enforcement of the law of one price in the form of the interest rate parity, b) the smoothening and the synchronisation of the consumption growth among countries, c) the increased diversification of investors portfolios, and d) the decreased dependence of domestic investments on national savings. These envisaged effects serve in the thesis as the indicators of the integration of NMS financial markets with the global financial market. These indicators show that the degree of the financial integration differs among the NMS, despite the fact that they all went through the process of integration with the EU. However, the order of the NMS based on the degree of their financial markets integration could not have been determined as each test indicated a different order. However, most tests indicated that there is a trend towards more integration of the NMS financial markets as the dependence of the domestic consumption growth on the global consumption growth has been increasing and the dependence of domestic investments on national savings has been decreasing. Surprisingly, the indicators did not prove the hypothesis that NMS financial markets are more integrated with the financial market of the EU, despite the fact that these countries had to open their markets to investors from the EU and had to harmonize their legislative requirements. Contrary to the results of previous articles, indicators used in the thesis show that majority of the analysed puzzles in international economics disappeared for large developed markets like the USA. On the other hand, these puzzles persisted for the NMS. Given that majority of the NMS adopted euro during the period under investigation, results presented above indicate that the financial markets of the NMS were not fully integrated with the financial market of the EU and therefore one of the conditions for the existence of the optimum currency area has not been met. Such result also contradicts the hypothesis of the endogeneity of the optimum currency area as the adoption of the common currency did not improve the degree of financial market integration.