Prague Economic Papers, 1998 (vol. 7), issue 3

Original contributions, Original article, Research article

Echoing the european monetary integration in the czech republic

Oldřich Dědek

Prague Economic Papers 1998, 7(3) | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.152

Even in the case of an optimistic scenario of joining the EU at an early stage in the next century, CE countries are highly unlikely to participate in the take-off stage of EMU. Instead, they are expected to address some more elementary issues related to their transition processes. But the fact of being a small and open economy implies a high degree of macroeconomic discipline, in many respects not so much unlike that embedded in the Maastricht convergence criteria. Whatever disputes many surround the Maastricht convergence criteria, one can scarcely deny that they do suggest directions in which CE economies need to further upgrade their fundamentals....

National trajectories of post-socialist tranformation: is there a convergence towards western capitalisms?

Bernard Chavance, Eric Magnin

Prague Economic Papers 1998, 7(3) | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.153

The hypothesis of convergence, interpreted as a univocal transition towards a market economy without adjective, i. e. as a determinist trend facing possible obstacles or delays, appears clearly wrong in the light of the experience of post-socialist economic change. The latter is rather a complex systemic transformation process marked by the emergence of path-dependent national capitalism, displaying general similarities and persisting national peculiarities. Indeed national paths of change in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, mix elements of convergence, elements of divergence and reproduced differences to the target model. Common tendencies...

Producer prices and inflation rate in the czech republic

Tomáš Holub

Prague Economic Papers 1998, 7(3) | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.154

The development of industrial producer prices is commonly observed as one of the important leading indicators of consumer price inflation. Nevertheless, there was no apparent relationship between total inflation and producer prices in the Czech Republic from 1993 to 1997. This paper is an attempt to find a possible explanation of the above mentioned paradox using statistical end econometric analyses. The main idea is that the prices of industrial producers do not have a straightforward relationship to the development of prices in the entire consumer goods basket, but only to its particular subset. Indeed, the performed correlation and regression analyses...

Transformation in a socio-economic perspective

Jiří Večerník

Prague Economic Papers 1998, 7(3) | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.155

Transformation cannot be completed unless markets hit not only formal, but also substantive aspect of economy. It involves economic institutions (first of all private ownership), economic behavior (based on confidence and other traditional values) and economic actors (especially the middle classes). The weak ties of social relationships have their strength under transformation, be it the former nomenklatura, continuing local brotherhoods end new clans. In the surroundings of unbalanced chances and weak institution, market appears in a mutilate form and privatisation process sometimes even supports monopolies. Economic problems in the Czech Republic...

Non-stationarity and structural breaks in mineral price and supply historical series

Stefano Mainardi

Prague Economic Papers 1998, 7(3) | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.156

Mineral commodity prices and, to a lesser extent, supply have typically experienced substantial fluctuations as well as sudden, largely unanticipated, breaks. Instability has severe consequences in term of returns on mining investment and the balance of payments of the countries concerned. Studies on commodity instability ignore non-stationarity and tend to focus on relatively short time series. Other studies, that investigate whether economic variables behave as random walks or as mean-reverting series, seldom pay attention to structural breaks, end mainly examine macroeconomic variables. Following an overview of historical and methodological issues,...