Prague Economic Papers, 2009 (vol. 18), issue 1

Original contributions, Original article, Research article

Lessons from the czech and slovak economies split

Růžena Vintrová

Prague Economic Papers 2009, 18(1):3-25 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.338  

The less developed Slovak economy was converging quickly to the Czech economic level after the World War II, thanks to the massive reallocation of resources. The inflow amounted to 11% of the Slovak GDP, the outflow from the Czech Lands represented 4% of their GDP. The Slovak GDP per capita reached around three quarters of the Czech one in 1992. After the split of Czechoslovakia, the economic policy adjusted to the changed conditions by sinking real wages and depreciation of Slovak koruna, so that the Slovak ULC are the lowest among the Central European countries now. The cost competitiveness, accompanied by an abundant inflow of FDI and economic reforms...

Some notes about decentralization process implications on public administration corruption in romania

Tudorel Andrei, Ani Matei, Stelian Stancu, Bogdan Oancea

Prague Economic Papers 2009, 18(1):26-37 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.339  

The paper investigates some features of the corruption in the public administration in a country, which is in the process of integrating into the new structures of the European Union. We estimated the parameters of a regression model that analyses factors like political system pressure, administration transparency, and service quality provided by civil servants using data sets for a representative civil servants sample. Using the regression model and ANOVA we came to the conclusion, that the perception of the corruption has significant differences at the level of the four types of public administration institutions analysed in this paper. The main...

Housing price bubble analysis - case of the Czech republic

Jan Čadil

Prague Economic Papers 2009, 18(1):38-47 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.340  

The paper deals with the hypothesis of housing price bubble in the Czech economy. This topic is very popular among economists worldwide now, especially because of the U.S. housing crisis and subsequent collapses on financial markets. However, surprisingly there are not many analyses dealing with the Czech housing market (besides e.g. very brief Financial Stability Report published by the Czech National Bank in 2008) and with the possible housing bubble burst. The first standard bubble indicators like P/I ratio are used to identify the bubble possibility on the Czech housing market. As the second step a regression analysis (VAR model) is being used...

On the relationship between real and nominal variables in developed countries

Petr Duczynski

Prague Economic Papers 2009, 18(1):48-60 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.341  

The paper examines money-output and price-output relations in developed countries between 1980 and 2005. We observe that declines in the nominal monetary base are connected with a moderately below-average behaviour of the real output. The same result applies for small positive growth rates of nominal M1 and M2. High growth rates of money are associated with the above-average product growth. We have some evidence that broader monetary aggregates are more closely associated with the real product than narrower monetary aggregates. As opposed to the money-output connection, we show that low inflation was accompanied by high product growth.

Regional distribution of technology-intensive manufacturing industries in the czech republic with an accent on risk of delocalisation

Jan Ženka, Vladislav Čadil

Prague Economic Papers 2009, 18(1):61-77 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.342  

The goal of this article is to determine whether low capital intensive firms, characterised by low productivity and low level of R&D activities that operate in technologically intensive branches of the Czech manufacturing industry, tend to be localised in economically lagging regions which are attractive for costs seeking FDI. We wanted to determine to the Czech regions that are more threatened by delocalisation of manufacturing activities. The assessment of companies' localisation stability is based on 3 economic indicators representing internal keep-factors of delocalisation - capital intensity, complexity of value chain, and sophistication of production...