<p>The purpose of this thesis was to from a Swedish perspective investigate the fantastic growth rates of Estonia and Latvia and why it became such a massive collapse when the world economy was slowing down.</p><p>To build a theoretical foundation for the investigation several international macroeconomic theories such as the Mundell-Flemming model, the fundamental national income equilibrium, and international parity relations were used.</p><p>The empirical section shows that Estonia and Latvia have based much of their growth on imports from their Baltic and especially their Nordic neighbours. At the same time they have been highly dependent on continuously growing Nordic stock markets and high risk appetite from investors to be able to keep the fabulous growth figures.</p><p>The conclusions drawn are that it has been possible for Estonia and Latvia to grow at fast rates, by running large current accounts deficits, as long as the world was in a boom. But when the world economy is slowing down they are now forced into the very painful process of re-establishing a more balanced current account.</p>

The purpose of this thesis was to from a Swedish perspective investigate the fantastic growth rates of Estonia and Latvia and why it became such a massive collapse when the world economy was slowing down. To build a theoretical foundation for the investigation several international macroeconomic theories such as the Mundell-Flemming model, the fundamental national income equilibrium, and international parity relations were used. The empirical section shows that Estonia and Latvia have based much of their growth on imports from their Baltic and especially their Nordic neighbours. At the same time they have been highly dependent on continuously growing Nordic stock markets and high risk appetite from investors to be able to keep the fabulous growth figures. The conclusions drawn are that it has been possible for Estonia and Latvia to grow at fast rates, by running large current accounts deficits, as long as the world was in a boom. But when the world economy is slowing down they are now forced into the very painful process of re-establishing a more balanced current account.

This paper aims to explain the current account imbalances between the United States of America, Japan and China. According to theory, such imbalances should offset each other so that the international balance of payments account is zero. The study also tests the Uncovered Interest Rate Parity (UIP) theory for the same sample of countries. The focus is on the empirics of the topic, therefore time-series analysis is used. The results suggest that American current account deficit can indeed be explained by the surpluses of the Japanese and Chinese current accounts. Furthermore, the conclusion regarding the UIP is that it simply does not hold in the real world. Finally, the main implication of this study is that the Asian countries will eventually buy up American assets if the trend of imbalances continues.