A one year break
All the lecturers and participants have left Przegorzały. During the whole week we have heard 12 speeches from top experts in the area of monetary policy. The time of intensive work was also a fun time. We hope that there will emerge some working papers or articles inspired with this summer school or even a collaboration. If yes, please let us know. Many thanks to National Bank of Poland, Cracow University of Economics, Dr. Łukasz Mamica, Magdalena Banaś and all who helped organize this event. We hope we will meet at the same place, same time, next year :)
Closing lecture
The last lecture during the Cracow International Summer School was given by Prof. Andrzej Wojtyna from Cracow University of Economics, former member of Polish Monetary Policy Council. His speech was build up uppon 10 main questions for Polish economy. Knowing that he is closing the Summer School, he started with an anegdote: "Who are economists? They are people that take something that works very well in practice, and they prove that theoretically it cannot work.". This joke was not only to warm up this rainy morning, but also to go smoothly not only to the topic of economic crisis but also crisis of economics as a science.
First few questions were touching the problem of resilience of Polish economy to the crisis and the pre-crisis speed of growth (also potential rate of growth). What happened during the slowdown is also important: hoarding labour force by companies, high inflation, weakening of polish złoty. Of course there had to be question about the 55% limit for public debt in Poland. Some political issues also appeared like idea of dismantling of the Polish pension system or the probability of structural reforms forced by the threat of the crisis. There was also difficult question if the banking sector supervision should return to NBP. The last question was the most general and philosophical about the future of capitalism. Wojtyna asked altogether 13 questions trying to give some hints rather than answers. Presented issues are most current challenges for Polish economists and politicians.
During Q&A session Wojtyna used another joke to explain troubles that economics as a science has: "There was a professor at some university that in each year asked the same exam question. The difficulty was that each year, correct answer was different."
Summary of the day 6
The sixth day of school summer was filled with two very powerful speeches. Morning session with Dr. Peter Mooslechner, Director of the Department of Economics at the National Bank of Austria, was based mainly on the analysis of structural reforms. There were discussed very current issues in the face of crisis, and therefore need to introduce substantial structural changes, not only correcting the current policy. In the context of such activities the International Monetary Fund is always an important actor, so there were few minutes devoted to analyze the actions and opportunities of this institution. In the question and answer session one could feel that as an Austrian economist Mooslechner in his statements strongly alluded to the characteristic of the Germans historical approach to economics.
The second lecture was a presentation by a representative of the Central Bank of the Czech Republic, Dr. Tomáš Holub. His presentation was filled with a lot of details about previous and current monetary policy of the Czech Republic. Many times it seemed that the situation is quite similar to the Polish but visible and important differences even in the level of public debt are not to be missed.
"Italian day" - part 2
Second lecturer during day 5 was dr Pasquale Tridico, University of Rome. He presented his own paper on the implications of the crisis on the labour market. There was a heated debate touching some bold statements in presented paper. Tridico prepared an indicator "Crisis Management Index" that was important in the process of explaining main sources of crisis or rather explaining sources of resilience to the crisis. Tridico deliberately and consciously held the position other than the mainstream. He was proving that labour market flexibility is harmful for economy. Main policy suggestions were focusing on the labour market problems and uneven distribution of income. Several times he also emphasized that economics is a social science and therefore can not rely exclusively on econometrics. Some methodological issues have been raised when some doubts rose but overall everybody was satisfied with this intellectually stimulating meeting. The last words of Tridico was invitation to the annual conference of European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy that will be held in Kraków on 18-21 October 2012. After such passionate speech, definitely this conference became more interesting for the participants.Sunday morning
Sunday morning started at Cracow International Summer School with the lecture from prof. Francesco Daveri from University of Parma. Daveri concentrated on Maastricht criteria and Mundell criteria of Optimum Currency Area. He reminded that most of EU countries were not meeting those conditions.
He experimented with the data to show hypothetical groups of countries that are more suitable for common currency, than euro area. He showed also that similar countries behaved during crisis similarly no matter whether they are in monetary union.