PANEL ANALYSIS OF WAREHOUSING ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE IN 13 NEW EU MEMBER STATES

Abstract

Warehousing and transportation support activities are an important part of the
overall transportation sector. COVID-19 outbreak requires a prediction of future risks
contingent in the overall economic predicament. The purpose of this paper is to
contribute to the analysis of possible adverse effects of this crisis on the Warehousing
activity. We analysed a 10-year panel from 2008 to 2017 of 13 latest European Union
member countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary,
Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia, and their data
representing the “Warehousing and support activities for transportation” of the overall
“Transportation and storage sector”. We differenced the data to achieve stationarity
and to lose the idiosyncratic effects present in the coefficients. We regressed the
variables representing the overall economy on warehousing and transportation support
activities. The null hypothesis of no-causation may be rejected for most causal
conjectures with three successive test methods: Panel Pairwise Granger Causality test,
Panel Estimated Generalized Least Squares with Fixed Effects, and Panel Generalized
Method of Moments with First Differences. We conclude the changes in the overall
economy have an impact on warehousing and transportation support activities in terms
of its value added.
Key words: warehousing, transportation support activities, panel analysis.