Is the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle still with us? National saving-investment dynamics and international capital mobility: A panel data analysis across EU member countries

This paper investigates the degree of financial integration and international capital mobility by analysing the dynamics of national saving-investment relationships. We interpret the relationship between national saving and investment in the long run as reflecting a solvency constraint and focus on the short-term saving-investment relationship to assess the degree of capital mobility. We apply the Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (PARDL) model proposed by Pesaran et al. (1999) using data for 14 EU member countries from 1970 to 2013. Our empirical results suggest that there exists a close relationship between saving and investment in the long run that is consistent with the existence of a solvency constraint that is binding for each country in the long run. We also find that the parameter for the error-correction term is always highly significant, which supports the choice of an error-correction formulation. Moreover, we show that the parameter estimated for the error-correction term, i.e. the speed of adjustment to the long-run equilibrium, varies with the sample period considered. The estimated speed of adjustment becomes smaller in absolute terms as more recent data are included in the sample, which indicates that deviations from long- run equilibrium current accounts have become more persistent over time, signalling some degree of capital mobility.