| Abstract [eng] |
Loans help a country stay financially stable during economic downfall, war or natural disasters and to finance investments and growing state expenses. However, despite the benefits of loans, growing state debt means a larger risk to a state’s financial stability. Effective state debt management is an important index, especially to future generations, because state debt has a tendency to raise the current generations disposable income at the same time lowering the future generations disposable income. Scientific issue: how the debt sustainability indicators of European Union countries have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Object of the research: EU state debt sustainability. Objective of the research: After establishing the main state debt sustainability indexes, carry out the evaluation of debt sustainability of chosen EU countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Goals of the research: 1. Give proof of EU country debt sustainability problems during the COVID-19 pandemic 2. Define debt sustainability conception and differentiate the main state debt sustainability indexes. 3. Analyse the methods to evaluate state debt sustainability in foreign and Lithuanian literature. 4. Evaluate EU chosen countries debt sustainability indexes and their changes during the COVID-19 pandemic using the prepared methods of the research. The COVID-19 pandemic spread in the world, thus came the risk of state insolvency. Analysing the debt numbers of the EU, there is a notice of one of the biggest changes - mutual state debt and gross domestic product (GDP) relations in 2022 grew 12,3 percent point and the mutual EU country debt reached 120.090,4699 EUR. The debt of the rest of the largest economies in the world during the first year of the pandemic also rose accordingly. The largest state debt and GDP relation change during the pandemic occurred in Cyprus - 23,1 percent point, and Greece - 25,7 percent point. While the least changes occurred in Ireland - 1,4 percent point and Luxembourg - 2,1 percent point. During the COVID-19 pandemic state debt sustainability was heavily impacted by the acquired discrete fiscal encouragement means of the ECB and the EU, meant for country liquidity maintainment, which meant the maintainment of stability during the pandemic and after. State debt sustainability in literature is often understood as a process consisting of various actions and functions, and solvency and liquidity indexes help understand it better. Taking into account these indexes it is common to rely on various authors as well as the established marginal sustainability means of the International Monetary Fund. During the research an analysis of solvency and liquidity indexes was conducted and linear degression models were created. The efficiency of these models was estimated by the following steps: stationary analysis, correlation analysis, importance of the models variables, the models statistical importance, the accuracy of the model, residual error normalcy and error heteroskedasticity presumption verification. Estimating the state debt analysis of 7 selected EU countries, taking into account liquidity and solvency indexes, it was concluded that the debt of Malta and Greece did not satisfy the sustainability conditions, while the debt of Estonia and Luxembourg can be considered as sustainable. Taking into account every model of linear regression constructed for every selected country of the research, it can be stated that during a short times pan, the pandemic had a profound effect on debt sustainability of Greece, Finland, Estonia, Malta and Lithuania. Based on the results, during a short time span the pandemic did not have a profound effect on debt sustainability of Luxembourg and Cyprus, however, from a future perspective - the results could change. . |
